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Predictions for the SAP S4 Market in 2022

David Lowson
January 17, 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

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David Lowson

Expert in ERP Implementation, Package Solutions