ISG Provider Lens™ SAP - HANA and Leonardo Ecosystem Partners Archetype Report 2019
SAP S/4HANA Services
SAP’s ERP portfolio has evolved over the years, and the evolution can be traced to the changing needs of enterprise IT requirements. Against this backdrop of the evolution in the ERP domain and SAP’s portfolio, SAP launched S/4HANA to address aspects such as increasing complexity, legacy and highly customized applications, large databases and overall maintenance. The SAP S/4HANA offering thereby helps simplify data, applications and, at the same time, offers a rich user experience, among other benefits to the enterprise buyer.
SAP’s S/4HANA has been adopted by large and medium enterprise customers in industries such as manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, energy, automotive and utilities, to name a few, through both on-premises and cloud implementations.
We observe that enterprises are taking a customized, thoroughly evaluated and business need-driven approach to SAP S/4HANA adoption, ranging from landscape transformation with a digital focus, conversions (such as greenfield and brownfield) and management of existing legacy SAP ERP offerings.
- Manageability of legacy SAP ERP: Despite SAP’s sunsetting of its services for SAP ECC 6.0 by 2025, there exists a large base of enterprise clients that are reluctant to migrate to newer versions of SAP ERPs. These legacy ERPs are being maintained and managed by service providers or third-party enterprise software support providers. However, enterprise customers will eventually need to prepare themselves for a transition to a more recent version of SAP ERP and plan their future engagement roadmap with either service providers or third-party software support providers for this transition.
- Proprietary IPs, frameworks, tools and accelerators for SAP S/4HANA implementation: Providers are using proprietary frameworks with standardized templates, tools and accelerators to facilitate smooth and speedy implementations in for various SAP S/4HANA implementation.
- Industry-specific offerings for transformation: Service providers are offering industry-specific templates for SAP S/4HANA for the manufacturing, retail, CPG and utilities industries to help customers with implementation and business agility. Enterprises are seeking such offerings as a differentiator to help them in their transformation journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise and help them achieve faster time-to-market.