SAP is driving forward its focus on the cloud model

It is against this background that we have to interpret the results of PAC’s latest CxO Survey on SAP S/4HANA usage in European companies(see graph). 60% of respondents have chosen a model that is based on some sort of public cloud deployment, including RISE with SAP on hyperscaler infrastructure, plus all SaaS-native flavors of SAP S/4HANA. This percentage may seem quite high at first glance but it is actually in line with SAP's strategy because it includes those deployment models that Christian Klein mentioned as preferred editions in his announcement. That means these companies have opted for a future-proof path or are planning to do so (please note that these figures include companies that are already using SAP S/4HANA or plan to do so in the coming years). These figures were taken from PAC's "CxO Survey SAP S/4HANA – Modernization & Migration Strategy". We conducted the survey among 550 IT and LoB decision-makers in European companies, asking them about the status quo and investment plans with regard to topics such as SAP S/4HANA migration, the implementation approach (greenfield vs. brownfield vs. bluefield), BTP usage, process modernization, and provider deployment. Please contact me if you are interested in the detailed results.

Although this does not mean that SAP S/4HANA on-prem will no longer be functionally enhanced as yet, users will not be able to directly benefit from new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and green ledger. Basically, SAP is cutting off on-prem users from innovation because this innovation will be exclusively available in the cloud.