Plotting a New Course to Future Success with SAP
Video summary
The future of SAP isn’t following a single path.
Based on insights from a global survey of 455 organizations, this on-demand webinar reveals how enterprise IT leaders are charting their next move amid growing pressure to migrate, modernize and optimize spending.
CIO Magazine’s Jim Malone leads a thought-provoking discussion with Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics and Scott Hays of Rimini Street on the strategic choices SAP customers are making today.
Explore emerging trends in multi-vendor IT, composable enterprise architectures and business-driven modernization strategies. Learn how organizations are extending the life of existing SAP investments, freeing resources for innovation and building roadmaps that prioritize flexibility, control and long-term business outcomes.
For technology leaders evaluating the future of SAP, this session delivers practical insights into what your peers are doing now—and why.
Additional resources:
Video transcript
0:06 Jim Malone: SAP customers worldwide are facing unprecedented pressure to migrate to S4HANA and adopt cloud subscription models, often under confusing and shifting timelines. But a new global study reveals that most businesses are charting a different course. Rather than following a one-size-fits-all roadmap, they’re embracing multi-vendor strategies, composable architectures, and third-party support to unlock flexibility, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation.
Hi everybody, Jim Malone here, Senior Contributing Editor at CIO Marketing Services. I’ll be your host and moderator for today’s webcast, brought to you by CIO and Rimini Street, and featuring Freeform Dynamics. We’re delighted you can join us for an exclusive discussion with Tony Lock. Tony’s a distinguished analyst and Director of Engagement at Freeform Dynamics, along with Scott Hays, Senior Product Marketing Director at Rimini Street.
Our panel will unpack the study’s key findings, illuminating what 455 of your peers shared about their SAP roadmap. We’ve got a great session lined up. Let’s meet our speakers first up. A big welcome to Tony Locke, I mentioned, Director of Engagement and Distinguished Analyst with Freeform Dynamics. Tony, welcome. So glad you could be with us. Tell us a little bit about Freeform Dynamics and your work there.
1:31 Tony Lock: Thank you very much, Jim. It’s good to be here. I’m an analyst with Freeform Dynamics, as you say. I was a real IT manager, real IT pro in the dim and distant past and then worked on the dark side as a European pre-sales specialist. I’ve been an analyst for 25 years covering infrastructure and how it’s used to deliver services to people. So been around the block a few times and we do a lot of research trying to find out not just what people are doing, but why are they doing it?
1:59 Jim Malone:
Now let’s say hello to Scott Hays, Senior Director for Product Marketing with Rimini Street. Scott, thanks for being with us. Tell us a little bit about your work at Rimini Street.
3:52 Scott Hays: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jim and hi, Tony. My role at Rimini Street is really to help IT leaders understand the options that are available to them to support and optimize their enterprise software and to pursue innovation solutions that really bring them forward into the new world of Agentic AI ERP.
4:15 Jim Malone: Excellent. Thanks so much, Scott. Looking forward to your insights too. Great study here to discuss. So we’ll get to that in just a second. But first, I wanted to direct everyone’s attention to that resources list that you see on your player. There you’ll have lots of great information that you can download from our sponsor, from our panelists, that you can spend time with that, really explore these findings, explore these insights, accelerate your journey.
So we do recommend you take advantage of that. You’ll also discover how to get in touch with our sponsor, Rimini Street there, so that you can reach out. You’re going to hear lots of great information that’s going to resonate with you for certain. Take the next step, download those resources, reach out to Rimini Street. So we really encourage you to do so. And finally, a big thanks to our sponsor, Rimini Street, for making this event possible. So Tony and Scott, lots to discuss.
Tony, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s talk about the research itself. Can you tell us why you conduct the research, what you found about how SAP customers are actually feeling?
5:21 Tony Lock: It started off actually with a conversation that Scott held with myself and my colleague Dale Vile some time ago and just a throwaway remark there was it would be really interesting to find out what people are actually doing at the moment and what they understand about the wider range of options and compared to times past for when it comes to any upgrade. And so we basically sat down and decided great idea, but given the nature of the SAP environment and the complexity involved in ERP generally, we thought that rather than just doing this in terms of a standard, you know, filling a web survey form would be much more effective to actually get out there and talk to people. So we interviewed people at depth, so face to face, either over the telephone or in a web conference to get their feedback, but also people are much more open when you’re speaking with them than when they’re trying to type in answers, particularly if you’re asking for some free text information. If I’m typing in a survey and it asks me for what do you think about, I try and type in as little as possible because I’m a terrible typist. Whereas if you ask somebody that question verbally, they’ll give it to you straight away and that gives a lot more information and a lot more depth. So we went out and asked, you know, these 455 people, very senior people with experience of the SAP that’s running inside their organizations. We did a lot of vetting to ensure that across, you know, a wide range of geographies there. So North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, we covered an awful lot of people there in all sizes of organizations in a number of industries. And we got a lot of really interesting results back from that.
5:13 Scott Hays: Yeah, I’ll add to that. First of all, I appreciated working with Freeform Dynamics, just an excellent organization that really has a high standard for the quality of this kind of research. But secondly, to echo your point, Tony, that actually talking to people produced some very interesting insights in addition to the quantitative results that we found. And I would encourage those viewers who are with us today to download the report that does include many verbatim statements from these leaders about their perspective on their current solutions and their future strategies. And we made a point to include those, you know, verbatim quotes about what they said, about where they are and where they’re heading. So thank you, Tony, for taking that approach.
5:39 Tony Lock: Yeah, we even did some sentiment analysis on there, which involved us listening to the interviews to make sure that the sentiment analysis we were getting back from the technology was actually the same things that we thought were going on.
5:54 Jim Malone: Yeah, let me echo that in my research days as a content strategist. These in-depth interviews, IDIs we used to call them, they’re gold. There’s so much great information in there. You don’t have to guess what the data is telling you. They’re telling you right there. So Tony, can you run through just some of the top lines that you discovered?
6:12 Tony Lock: Certainly. The big things that we started off with were, you know, why do we do the research now? What’s triggering this in the SAP environment? And I suspect that everybody that’s watching us now will be very aware of a lot of those triggers themselves, but this will perhaps give them some confirmation there that other people are thinking exactly the same things that they are. We then went into things like the business benefits and how can you make a business case for upgrades generally, but more importantly, for going from the current environments into S4 HANA. Then we looked at, you know, what are the challenges and the advantages of doing so. Beyond that, we then tried to do some analysis on how are people actually using this and what are the options they’ve got there in terms of just upgrading straightforward in the way that
SAP would like everybody to move forwards and going to cloud as well as upgrading at the same time simultaneously or are there alternatives to that? And that’s some of the things that Scott touched on earlier around, you know, having composable options and alternative ways of supporting their environments. Because obviously for something like ERP, which frankly is about just about as mission-critical as you can get, you know, you need to have support and that’s it. It’s a no-brainer, you can’t live without it.
07:34 Jim Malone: And as far as that part, Tony, about how our customers are feeling, is there kind of an overall statement about what you find? mean, are they happy with it? What was the sentiment?
07:45 Tony Lock: The big sentiment was that they were pretty happy with their current SAP environments, but there was much more concern around the way that things are being messaged to them at the moment and the way they are being encouraged, if not pressured, into making these two complete changes from their traditional on-site ERP running of their SAP environments into S/4 HANA running in the cloud. there were concerns raised there around lots of issues. But one of the biggest things that comes back to the point of why do we do the research now is, you know, clearly that pressure is felt by everybody. They’re being communicated with all the time about you’ve got to move forward, you’ve got to plan and it takes time. You talk to anybody in the SAP world and they’ll tell you that, you know, these things are not, you know, overnight or, you know, even six month migration projects. They are things you’ve really got to plan very carefully and particularly with the movement to S/4 HANA where the recommendations are not simply to do a lift and shift to migrate and upgrade your software, but also potentially to change processes as well as move into a cloud environment. And so we heard some things that came out quite clearly here, particularly around a lot of the communication that’s going on where people were pretty concerned about the way the messages were coming through, how sometimes they change either partially or quite a lot. And then sometimes feeling that they were benefits being pushed as being there to be had by everybody without actually going through some of those challenges of making the changes and moving forward. A few people, as you can see from this particular chart, also said that they were concerned that a lot of the changes being made appeared to reflect things that were really great for SAP, but maybe not so beneficial for them. The folks concerned here not worried about cloud per se, they’re all using cloud. They’re not worried about SAP because they’re running the businesses on it. They know that it works. It’s just how to move forwards and you know, the pressure they’re feeling to do that.
10:02 Scott Hays: Yeah, I think that’s exactly true, Tony. And you remember when we started this, we had an hypothesis. And if I could summarize it, we felt that, or we imagined that these leaders were wanting to look at this from three perspectives. One, autonomy or control, depending on which way you talk about it. Two, risk and three, cost. And when, as we learned, so many of them felt that the existing SAP system they had, whether it was ECC or frankly whether it was S/4 HANA on-prem, because they’d already done that, they felt that it had a longer lifetime value and stability than SAP was willing to support. so they sensed that SAP is wresting control from them and limiting their autonomy going forward. As you say, no one’s afraid of the cloud. I mean, we’ve helped clients move, ECC on-prem to a cloud, right? A lift and shift model. Keep your licenses, keep your perpetual licenses. And so, you know, our, our, our encouragement for those leaders is really look at the future cost and walk-in of moving to a subscription, and only migrate if it makes sense and you know, just kind of push back and say no, this is my business. It’s my choice and let’s see what the appropriate mix of existing software existing deployment new software new deployment existing license new subscription and service providers. What is the appropriate mix for that leader? Let them make that choice.
11:52 Tony Lock: Those choices, it’s a very complex landscape as you just described.
11:56 Jim Malone: Yeah, and Tony, I think the result was only one in six. What’s that? 17 % feel confident about those choices going forward. That’s an opportunity. Yeah.
12:07 Tony Lock: Yeah, it’s absolutely. As you can see from the chart, only under one in five, one in six, 17 % said they were very confident that they understood all of the options that SAP were pushing forward. And obviously SAP has got their own interests. They’re not going to be telling people about alternative options to move forward. And the risk that Scott talked about earlier is absolutely paramount. As I said, this is just about as business critical and application sweet as you can get. It’s not a single thing that you can maybe migrate very quickly or even migrate easily. It’s a question of that risk that Scott again talked about because there’s so much of the business that hangs off of SAP.
12:50 Jim Malone: Yeah, it seems too like there’s a lot of pressure to a lot of pressure on these organizations to follow that path rather than taking control the autonomy that Scott’s talked about. Tony, what’s driving this shift?
13:10 Tony Lock: The big starting point for this is that, know, clearly everybody is very interested, not just in investment, but in terms of actually innovation for their organizations to, you know, improve the business, improve profits, make sure that things are working both for the organization, but also for their customers. And so people want to innovate. IT wants to innovate. Everybody knows this, but where that innovation is going to be coming from was something that came through very interesting in the results here that you can see on the chart that the dark blue, the innovations coming from SAP, that’s where the most meaningful innovations are gonna come from. Well, as you know, around about one in 10 to one in eight people, the vast majority thought that it would not just be innovations from SAP that would be driving them forwards, giving them new opportunities to change and to move their organizations but from other parties as well which is something that we’ll be talking about in just a moment or two. Does that reflect what you see Scott when you’re talking to people?
14:17 Scott Hays: Well, it absolutely does. And it’s why we talk about pursuing a composable architecture, choosing best of breed applications, in class service providers. And look, we’ve all seen how quickly the landscape has changed from an AI perspective. And the leaders in AI are not typically the traditional ERP vendors. mean, people are adopting AI from vendors and creators they hadn’t heard of 12 or 24 months ago. And I think that’s what’s reflected in those light blue bars there is that somebody else is doing some innovation around or above my ERP that can get me farther faster.
15:03 Tony Lock: Interestingly, even though some of the other results that are in the report that you’ve got the links to here show that people do see potential benefits from upgrading to S/4 HANA in terms of the innovation that it delivers, even the S/4 customer base here think that those third parties also have an awful lot to offer, just as much on the innovation side as SAP itself.
15:35 Jim Malone: Scott, do you want to talk more about that link to AI and agentic AI through kind charting your own course, kind of the doors that open for innovations and disruptive technologies like AI and agentic AI?
15:46 Scott Hays: Yeah, boy, we could we could stick on that for another whole webcast, Jim. But in a nutshell, what we’re seeing is that the traditional model of getting work done by navigating a menu structure and a series of forms and an ERP application are cumbersome and slow and tedious. And they’re often siloed to a particular part of a process as opposed to actually being an end to end process in itself. Let me explain. We’ve seen some of our clients push that ERP capability into the background and really look first at the work to be done and the people who do it and to present to them a whole new look at how do I get this work done?
What systems and data sources do I need to bring into that process? Because guess what? They were always part of the process, but it was tedious. It was what we called “swivel chair integration” or “human middleware”. And now we’re able to provide a modern UX user experience that encompasses all of that, pulls it all into single screens, a single pane of glass as we talk about it, and inject the intelligence of AI-based insights and actions. So a particular persona who has work to get done, they get presented with what’s important right now, because AI went out and figured that out and said, hey, here are the things you ought to be paying attention to. Here’s your options to consider. And then the human says, great, I’m going to go option B, boom, click. And then the agent takes over, gets the work done. And guess what’s happening? Way down below it, somewhere, there is data that’s coming in and out of that SAP system, but the user never ever touched the menus or forms to get their work done. They just got it done with the benefit of the agents. SAP is still very, very important as a system of record, but not as a system of engagement.
18:00 Jim Malone: So Tony, with changes like this always comes disruption challenges, of course. What is the organization struggling with when it comes to justifying S4 HANA?
18:14 Tony Lock: That’s a really interesting point there, Jim. Essentially, when we ask the issue of how easy is it to actually make a business case? Because if you’re doing any upgrade, whether it’s to S/4 HANA or any other application, you’ve got to have reasons for doing that, the proverbial business case. And you can see from the chart here on the left-hand side that, only one in 20 of the folks that we interviewed actually thought that it was easy to make an upgrade business case. They’re happy with their environments, they’d like to do more, but making a business case in the way that it’s being presented to them by SAP was causing them some issues. You can see that almost a third said it’s really hard and the other two thirds are basically saying, yeah, it’s at least take some effort and do we do it all at once or just piece by piece? And the problems there were particularly to get to some of the things where upgrading to S/4 HANA and moving to a cloud model together, those were the combination. Moving to S/4 HANA, maybe they’ve got a business case for doing that for some of those innovations or the ease of management, things like this. But the big concerns that came through when we asked people about this were the escalating and unpredictable subscription costs with the nature of the model that SAP is proposing for using S/4 HANA in the cloud. And given the complexity of the ERP environment, it’s almost impossible for people to actually budget that and be confident about that going forwards. And then almost equally important, they’re worried about vendor lock- in. Everybody’s always worried about vendor lock-in, but when your business is running on ERP, as we’ve mentioned at least two times before this, you’re worried about the potential of it running in somebody else’s cloud, especially if something happens either in your financial relationship with them, your personal relationships with them, the company relationships, even geopolitical things could get in there. People are worried about everything outside of their control. Whereas ERP has always until now sat inside the organization. The organization had absolute control, knew what it needed to do, knew how to minimize the risk in terms of delivering that service, making sure it’s always available. Whereas when somebody else is running a lot of that infrastructure for you and you’re simply accessing it, you’re putting a lot of trust in somebody else’s hands and that’s, you know, not easy to come through there. And then there’s some of the lock-in that comes with running a service that’s basically presented to you rather than giving you the ability to customize. And if there’s any application that’s ever been customized by customers, as I’m sure Scott will confirm, it’s SAP and the entire ERP environment that it has there.
So that loss of control of the technology roadmap, which again, Scott touched on a little earlier, has come through there, but also things like data sovereignty and regulatory compliance in terms of, know, where’s this cloud running? Who’s got access to it? How much can I lock it down if I need to? Things like that. How do I report to the auditors? So those are the things that people are really worried about, never mind actually being able to do this in the time scales that SAP.
21:31 Scott Hays: Yeah. Yeah, I you know, Tony, we we’ve had clients come to us who have brought business cases to the board and been sent back to rethink it because it was tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. This isn’t just an upgrade. It’s a complete replatforming of all things SAP and the vendor lock-in has, you know, three major components, commercial, technical, and future options, right? Future optionality. And so that bundled subscription agreement is part of this replatforming.
And whatever approach you take to it, whether it’s Brownfield or Greenfield and SAP, you know, leaders will understand what we’re talking about there. What you’re going to end up with on the Monday morning after a few years of the process is frankly not that much different from what you had two years and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars earlier. The real opportunity is to do something else beyond different new providers than what you were doing with the traditional SAP software.
So, that’s what they’re coming to us with is “We can’t come up with a business-justified ROI-positive reason to move to S/4 HANA.” And then we’d ask, “well, are you still” “well, yeah, we’re still considering it.” “Why?” “Because SAP is going to stop supporting our ECC.” “Oh, okay. Understood. We got you. Let’s talk. Rimini Street can support what you have for 15 years or more.”
23:27 Jim Malone: Excellent. Thanks Scott. We’re chatting with Scott Hays with Rimini Street, Tony Lock with Freeform Dynamics. Tony, I’m wondering, one of the terms that has surfaced as we prepare for this webcast is the progressive approaches. Can you explain progressive approaches and whether they actually deliver results?
23:43 Tony Lock: I certainly do both of those, Jim. And it really feeds back to what Scott has just hinted at there that, you know, companies like Rimini Street have got your back, particularly in terms of that support, but also now in terms of what’s being called composable architectures. Everybody out there will recognize the growth in APIs as an integration mechanism over the course of the last five to 10 years, so much so that they become almost pervasive.
And so when we asked people, know, looking at these ways of integrating best of breed solutions into your ERP platform, does that give you any benefits? Do they give you anything of value to you to get back to the stuff that Scott was just talking about there in terms of making the business case? You can see here that the freedom to select those best of class solutions rather than having to take what you’re being given by the one supplier.
And it doesn’t just apply to SAP, it applies to everybody that sells solutions. The ability to make the best for what works for your organization, which might be different in certain parts than for other organizations and different from what SAP is going to bring into its portfolio. And avoiding vendor lock-in, again, another great thing that we talked about as one of those concerns that people have.
Using this composable architecture to give you that freedom to change, the freedom to do what your business needs to do, what you want to do, as opposed to what somebody else is offering you the chance to move forward with or with cloud solutions, not the choice, but it actually changes for you.
So adapting new solutions, being able to innovate more quickly to get back to something again that Scott was talking about earlier and getting emerging technologies like AI and AI agents and adopt agentic AI included in the way people work is something that people can see that really does resonate with them in terms of a benefit.
But then looking forward, how do those systems resonate with you, particularly if you combine the extended life support, third party support that Scott’s company has been providing to people for a long, long time. People can see here that Having heard of those potential benefits, again, do they work for you? So extending the SAP system lifetime beyond those official lifetimes that SAP is currently telling you that you’ve got to move off of ECC. That’s a real biggie for everybody here. You can see the dark blue and the mid blue charts there. Even the three, it’s a slight benefit to us.
There’s almost everything here that resonates with the people out there actually working in these SAP environments. Even freeing budget for innovation in other areas by taking the best of breed and working out what works for them, not what they have to do. And never mind that substantial annual support cost savings. That’s something that used to be a big reason, but as I’m sure Scott will tell us, it’s now just an additional benefit.
26:58 Scott Hays: Yeah, it is.
We know that our clients come to us because the issue isn’t about software versions. It’s not even necessarily about ERP capabilities. Those are very much mature, robust. Most of our clients come to us with highly customized systems. And it’s a question about how do I move my business forward? How do I take advantage of technology that’s available to me today without having disrupt the thing that I have invested in for years and years? You sometimes people would call a five, six, seven year old system legacy or technical debt.
You know, we often shy away from using those terms here because those are the systems that are exactly running your business and you’ve made an investment in them. It’s not debt. You are continuing to get an ROI from that investment. So how can we accelerate that? And on this slide, we just talk about a tale of two strategies. This is a tectonic shift kind of point in ERP software. Which way are you going to go? An SAP has forced the hand of their clients. Are they going to take the SAP path on the bottom of this and have what we call compounded costs?
I mentioned the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in that migration or replatforming and deferred innovation because I don’t really get to do the innovation until I’ve finished that massive replatforming effort or am I going to take a different path? Keep my stable customized performant ECC or S/4 HANA on-prem system move it to the cloud if I want. But really, because I keep it and I don’t do the migration, now I can accelerate that innovation that’s going to come from a number of different vendors. And I can do that, as Tony said, with the APIs and capabilities of having ECC or S/4 HANA as my system of record while I choose to use new innovation across that top path. So what do I get there? Compounded value and accelerated innovation. And we’ve believed that that’s the better strategy forward and that is a common story for clients that come to Rimini Street.
29:19 Tony Lock: Yep. And as Jim asked the question right at the beginning there, you know, are there any benefits from taking this, you know, progressive approach combining, you know, something of a more adaptable architecture and extended support? The results really do speak for themselves.
As part of the study, we like to do some maturity testing, some testing of value. And so we asked people, how well does your current ERP environment support your needs in the following areas? And you can see the results that came back there.
So we basically scored each individual’s answer on a five, four, three, two, one basis, as you can see from the bottom of the chart there. And then average that out, summed everything up, took what’s the mean score and split the group into two sections. So those with an above average capability, ability in terms of how well it meets their current environments and those with a below average. And from that, we then said, okay, what approach do people take there? Are they just using third party support, are they using composable architectures? Are they using both or they’re using neither? And you can see from the green bars here that over four people out of every five in terms of this study, remember it’s 455 people that know what they’re talking about, know, are users of both the composable approach and extended support, or there’s, you know, again, four and five using just third party support alone, half are using just open composable.
So the benefits here, you see these are the higher performers. There are more higher performers in those groups than in those that are just using neither approach. It’s not a cause-and-effect relationship, but as correlations go, it’s pretty strong.
31:07 Scott Hays: Tony, that’s such an encouraging result. Not surprising, but encouraging to see that both Composability and third-party support are actually helping real life customers achieve what they want to achieve and getting better performance, business performance, not just software, business performance from those choices that they have and that they made to do that.
31:29 Tony Lock: I suspect that a lot of that comes from the ability you’re giving them to make choices that work for them as much as actually the technologies and the approaches themselves.
31:40 Scott Hays: Yeah, like I said at the beginning, that’s my mission in life is to make sure they understand what their alternatives are and to keep their options open for the future.
31:48 Tony Lock: Just to wrap things up a bit here, Jim, we asked people about, where do they think they’re going to be running SAP in five years time? And you can see here that people are not against running it in the cloud. There’s, know, 51 % they think they’re going to be running S/4 HANA in the cloud. Whereas, you know, 14 % think they’re going to be running S4HANA on-prem and another 23 % think they’re going to be running ECC on premises. Those premises could be in their own data center in a COLO that they’re hosting whatever. But you know, the point is here that there’s 49 % of people saying they don’t think they’re going to be running entirely in the SAP cloud environment in five years time.
32:33 Scott Hays: We’re talking tens of thousands of organizations here.
32:40 Tony Lock: Yep. It’s a lot of people and a lot of really important operations that they’re running using these platforms. So everything is still essentially out there for people to make their choices on.
32:53 Jim Malone: Excellent, thanks, Tony. Thanks, Scott. We’re almost at the end of our time, but before we go, I wanted to give our panelists a chance just to leave our viewers with key takeaways, final thoughts, really, to retain and take away from our session today. Let’s do that, and let’s start with you, Tony. What’s the one thing you want organizations to takeaway?
33:17 Tony Lock: The biggest thing for me is that you’re not alone. Everybody else, nearly everybody else is in the same place that you are having to make these choices. And you’ve got more choices now than maybe you thought that you did have, given the pressure that’s being exerted from the communications that you’ve been receiving.
33:36 Jim Malone: Excellent, thanks Tony. Scott Hays with Rimini Street, your final thoughts.
33:42 Scott Hays: Great, thanks Jim. You know, I just want to take an opportunity to introduce our viewers to the Rimini Smart Path. And I’ve alluded to pieces of this as we went, but this notion, this methodology of support, optimize, innovate is what’s really changing the game for where our clients are headed with their, not just their ERP systems, their full enterprise software portfolios.
And the uniqueness of this from a Rimini Street perspective is that the true ultimate business goal and business value is on the innovation side and it’s coming at us fast with the agentic AI. But it’s not necessarily easy to get there, easy to fund it. What we do and what’s unique to this smart path is with the support. Turn over your vendor support to Rimini Street third party support and save a lot of money that you can then redeploy. And it’s not just money, it’s time and it’s people that you can then redeploy to those innovation projects that are going to move your business forward.
So this is the unique methodology that we offer to all of our clients who are willing to say, “Whoa, whoa, stop the madness. Let’s not just migrate and replatform and give up our perpetual licenses, let’s keep that stable, performant, customized, compliant, secure environment going and do something really cool on top of it.” And that’s what we’re pleased to offer our clients as a roadmap for the future when they follow this three-step, easy, support, optimize, innovate roadmap.
35:29 Tony Lock: And as Scott and I were talking about, you know, some time ago, the big takeaway from that is, you know, in the words of Douglas Adams and on the front cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic.”
35:41 Jim Malone: Excellent, excellent thought to close out our session. We are at the end of our time. A big thanks to our speakers, Scott Hayes with Rimini Street, Tony Locke with Freeform Dynamics. Thanks to you both. Great insights. You know, the goal was to help our viewers make confident informed decisions about their SAP strategy. Clearly, our panelists understood the assignment. Thanks to both of you for that.
Thanks to everyone who tuned in too. Now, before you go, just a quick reminder, check out that resources section. Undoubtedly, you heard something here that resonates with you, that’s going to help you on your SAP strategy going forward. So do take advantage. You can download a copy of the study that we talked about, spend some time with that data. There are great insights there. As you mentioned, those were interviews with 455 of your peers. Discover what they had to say about their SAP journey and that will help you with yours.
In the resources list, you’ll also discover how to reach out to our sponsor, Rimini Street, to really plan out your SAP journey. So take advantage of that. And with that, for CIO, Rimini Street, Jim Malone saying, thanks everyone for tuning in.
FAQs
What is this webinar about?
It covers insights from a global study of 455 organizations and explains how SAP customers are responding to migration pressure by exploring multi-vendor strategies, composable architectures and third-party support.
Who should watch this on-demand webinar?
This webinar is designed for CIOs and other enterprise IT leaders evaluating how to maintain flexibility, manage costs and modernize their SAP environment on their own timeline.
What should viewers do after watching?
Viewers should download the related white paper to explore the study findings in more detail and see how other SAP customers are taking control of their roadmaps.
Read the full research report
Download the full report, “Your ERP, Your Rules” to explore the global SAP customer study and learn how organizations are improving flexibility, reducing costs and accelerating innovation.
Speakers
Tony Lock
Scott Hays
Jim Malone
Additional resources
