Deployment Approaches to SAP S/4HANA 2025
Meet the Experts
Key Takeaways
⇨ A growing number of organizations now report that they will not complete a transition to SAP S/4HANA until after 2027.
⇨ Significantly more organizations are planning on deploying SAP S/4HANA Cloud, usually within RISE with SAP framework.
⇨ A majority of SAPinsiders are focusing on completing a SAP S/4HANA deployment as quickly as possible.
The first productive release of SAP S/4HANA, version 1511, is just a few months shy of being 10 years old. In that time the market has changed significantly, although that change has been accelerating over the last 12-18 months as against changing steadily over time. Despite the launch of RISE with SAP in 2021, and SAP’s push towards cloud ERP in general, most SAPinsiders have followed a more traditional approach in terms of both licensing and deployment. This has largely involved perpetual software licenses installed in on-premise infrastructure, although there has been a shift towards more of these deployments being in infrastructure-as-a-service environments in the private or public cloud. Despite not being new, it was originally launched not long after SAP S/4HANA itself, SAP S/4HANA Cloud has seen an increase in adoption over the years particularly due to the connection with RISE with SAP. However, that SAP S/4HANA Cloud adoption only represented a relatively small proportion of the SAP S/4HANA customer base.
This year that has changed. For the first time there is significant movement in the SAP S/4HANA market and the upcoming end of mainstream maintenance is driving that change. A majority of SAPinsiders are now focused on moving to SAP S/4HANA as quickly as possible. More than a third plan on deploying SAP S/4HANA Cloud through either RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP. And nearly a quarter of SAPinsiders now report that they will not complete a transition to SAP S/4HANA until after 2027. The combination of these factors, along with other data from the research, shows a market that has changed rapidly over the last year.
This year’s research also explored the deployment model that SAPinsiders plan to use. The emphasis on getting to SAP S/4HANA quickly means that more organizations than in the last few years are considering a system conversion, or brownfield, deployment. However, SAPinsiders must weigh this approach against the work that they will have to do after deployment to achieve a cleaner core.
The findings indicate that the race to deploy SAP S/4HANA before 2027 has become more serious, and that many SAPinsiders have realized that this goal is not readily achievable. However, for those that have been properly preparing, there is still time.
Download the benchmark report to read the full data analysis and receive recommendations for your own plans.
– Understand the how SAPinsiders are deploying SAP S/4HANA and the environments they will use.
– Explore the factors that are having the biggest impact on deployment timeline.
– Learn about the infrastructure that is planned for those SAP S/4HANA deployments.
– See what role SAP Cloud ERP is playing moving forward.
