Migrating to the cloud too slowly hinders organizations’ growth. SAP has come to this (not surprising) conclusion, which is essentially in line with its own words.

SAP Netherlands has conducted a survey of more than 400 business and IT decision makers from medium and large companies on the progress of cloud migration. This is often difficult, something that many Belgian organizations are aware of. SAP sees the biggest stumbling blocks as a lack of specific competencies, a lack of openness to change and the lack of a clear business case.

According to SAP, these are the typical symptoms of “cloud fear” (no, we didn’t make that pun up ourselves). The result is long and inefficient decision-making processes. For forty percent of companies, this takes up to two years, and for large companies, up to three years. Ultimately, in most organizations, it is the IT managers and the CEO who make the decision, although there often seems to be the influence of external consultants and/or partners.

Roll up your sleeve

SAP is not making this research public. The commercial monkey gets out of control very quickly. With the research, the ERP specialist wants to make it clear that delaying migration to the cloud will hinder the organization’s growth in the long term. Those who overcome the “cloud fear” say that the introduction of new technologies is much smoother.

Still not convinced? Then SAP has another argument up its sleeve. Shifting core processes to the cloud is important for AI implementation, among other things, and AI is most quickly accessible from the cloud. This statement also depends relatively on the perspective from which you look at it. HPE, for example, will not agree with this.

The objectivity of this research should therefore be viewed with caution. SAP itself has been relying on the cloud for several years and wants to integrate its ERP customers. Those who do not join in will miss out on new functionalities, which can cause dissatisfaction among customers who opted for an on-prem SAP environment at the time without knowing that this decision would ever have consequences. In addition, the deadline set by SAP for the migration of legacy customers to S/4 HANA in December 2027 is also approaching.