A new survey by the UK & Ireland SAP Users Group finds that a majority of SAP customers polled aren’t clear on how to migrate to SAP’s growing portfolio of on-demand applications, and what thee benefits are if they do.
According to the poll of 160 customers in the UK and Ireland, nearly 60% said SAP wasn’t making it attractive enough for them to move to the company’s cloud applications.
That’s a statistic SAP will have to do a better job of improving, especially as it continues to build its portfolio of on-demand applications. Those products include Financials OnDemand, which SAP rolled out last week in Madrid, in addition to acquisitions like the on-demand Ariba Network of buyers and sellers and SuccessFactors cloud-based HR software.
Perhaps even more troubling for SAP is that the confusion over its cloud roadmap doesn’t seem to be improving. Last year’s numbers were about the same, with 60% of respondents saying cloud adoption was being slowed by a lack of clarity over SAP’s product roadmap. And 59% of respondents said they don’t understand how to upgrade or integrate SAP OnDemand modules with their existing SAP implementation.
Clearly, SAP has a lot of work to do when it comes to getting customers more excited about cloud software.
Customers are also unhappy with licensing of SAP’s cloud applications. In this year’s survey, roughly 95% said there should be some kind of discounts, or the ability to trade licenses outright, for customers moving from on-premises to cloud applications.
Part of the dissatisfaction with licensing stems from the fact that companies see the cloud merely as a different way to deliver IT services, according to user group chairman Alan Bowling.
“Therefore, they are asking the question, if they have already invested in an IT service, do they want to pay for it again simply to have it delivered from the cloud?” Bowling said in a statement.
“We are now at the point where the benefits of cloud are well understood. [But] at the same time, users want to see how SAP’s recent acquisitions in the cloud space could benefit their organizations. Our figures show that currently the majority of users don’t understand how the acquisitions of Ariba and SuccessFactors will benefit them.”