Predictions for the SAP S4 Market in 2022

Please feel free to add some of your own projections for the year, but as per my tradition, I am making some predictions for the ‘S/4 market in 2022’. It is sort of fun! But may contain a grain of truth, since my hit rate seems to be just over 60%. At least 7 of these may be rubbish!

Please feel free to add some of your own or feel free to disapprove the ones I have made. But here they go…

•I think there is enough work out there to drive growth of over 30% in the SAP S/4 Market However, it may be constrained by resources rather than the market demand.

• There will be a big wave of S/4 in Big Pharma companies and a massive wave (the largest) will begin to build in Consumer products

• BTP will grow faster than the market and if SAP gets the pricing right it will be huge! This will be a battle for SAP that is worth watching, and will probably determine the future for the company and the industry

• The SAP RISE offer will evolve to support larger and more complex landscape, and its provisioning will become more hyperscaleresque.

• Resources will still be in short supply , but new talent will start to enter the market as teams will have completed their first delivery cycle. And client staff will start to look at consultancy careers

• Small SAP practices (if there are any left ) will continue to be snapped up by the big players and maybe some large staff transfers will take place from captives and internal teams

• More selective data migration in vogue still and less green field (instead of migrations), with the benefits being delivered incrementally once the migration is complete

• The S/4 go-lives in some of the larger organizations will start to provide momentum and learnings for the more conservative firms

• This is the big one. SAP will start to be seen as a transformation partner across ERP, SaaS, and PaaS, (BTP) and some clients will start to look at an SAP-first strategy

• SAP CX will begin to fight back against Salesforce for the delivery of complex business processes where integration is key (i.e. the move-to-service)

• SAP BRIM will be big! As customers move to new service models

• Pure players will still struggle to enter the market for S/4 transformation. They may commoditize for ADM and brownfield upgrades

• Delivery at pace and speedboats will be the norm. The 5-year waterfall will recede. ‘Speedboats’ will be an industry term.

• Google will shake up the hyperscaler market and take up to 30% of the market, but I am not sure who from, or is there enough growth for everyone?

• What we do with the data, and how do we manage it will be a big issue for reporting across old and new estates, customer and product data. The SI that can explain and deliver this will have a lead edge

• Big business drivers for S/4 programs: sustainability , simplification, the move-to-service, mergers and acquisition, new digital ways of doing business and agility

•I will spend my entire year trying to complete an end-to-end S/4 agile delivery method, that includes, architecture, budgets, benefits, change management, global roll outs, the transition to support , the business case, architecture, cloud economics, analysis of existing systems, ERP, SaaS, and BTP and still I will have missed something out!

Overall at the end of 2021, I sense that SAP S/4 and transformation has become a far more mainstream discussion and people are saying ‘when’ over ‘if’. I suspect this will gain momentum even further in 2022.

What do you think? Let me know at david.lowson@capgemini.com