A chance to be proved very wrong again - The 2021 SAP S4 Hana Predictions

Closer to 2100 years ago, Julius Caesar said ‘Alea iacta est’ (Since most of you didn’t study Latin like I did in my youth, Alea iacta est translates to, The die has been cast). Following mixed success and your enthusiastic engagement on my 2020 S/4HANA predictions, I decided to have another go with 2021 in personal capacity (nothing to do with my employer)! Beyond selfish motives of my predictions being affected, I really hope for no new COVID-like situation, or other unfortunate macroeconomic events.

Some of my 2020 predictions were delayed by COVID, but essentially were ok. The biggest changes were the acceleration of the move to cloud, and the changing dynamics between SAP and the Hypescalers, along with associated delivery approaches.

Prediction 1: 50% overall S/4HANA growth ensuring the overall SAP market pie becomes bigger

Baselining what I see in the marker over the last 3 years I see strong growth and a far larger number of individual clients. 2020 showed surprising growth despite COVID with the number of clients and 2021 should break the chasm

Prediction 2: Scarcity of SAP S/4HANA Skills

There was a CVOID down turn, but now that people fully engaged, we will need more SAP skilled people with the associated pressure on rates / pay etc.

Prediction 3: A shift across the market to platform SCP/BTP, agile and DevOps.

I think there will be no going back in 2021, I observe nearly all SAP partners have adopted the “keep the core clean” approach

Prediction 4: The Move to Cloud hosting will be tremendous.

The question will be: “What cloud?”, not, “Shall we go cloud?”

Prediction 5: Sustainability will become a big transformation driver.

It will feature central in most business cases and stay a top priority in CxO conversations

Prediction 6: Industry 4.0 will start featuring stronger in business cases, not only finance transformation

Consequently, architects, supply chain experts, and technical folks will be hard to find. We may see a new wave of younger more ‘digtial’ SAP consultants emerge who understand the “new” world better

Prediction 7: The world of cloud, native cloud development and SAP will collide

Methodologies and architectures will become very hybrid and SAP will have to be flexible to manage new processes/transformations

Prediction 8: The big shake up is in the SAP offer in the cloud

This is only the start of the story! The SAP and the hyperscaler journey still has a lot of twists and turns

Prediction 9: Market consolidation will continue for the SAP ecosystem

But at a slower pace due to the lack of suitable acquisitions

Prediction 10: AM/AD/Infrastructure/Business Integrations will all start to blur

Organizations will have to get these teams to work together or they will have some bumpy landings

Prediction 11: A number of projects will start as waterfall, template build and traditional roll out, but will pause or change to a new approach

Prediction 12: The 4 accountancy firms will try to build a stronghold on S/4HANA projects

I don’t think they will lose interest until there is an industrialised delivery place, which is still a few good years away

Prediction 13: I await the large drive by pure plays into the S/4HANA market

I suspect one will make strong progress this year, which one though, I shall not mention here!

Prediction 14: SAP S/4HANA will remain the flagship ERP with more of the suite remaining on SAP with less SaaS challenges

The integration and coherent GTM will decide the latter prediction on the suite

Prediction 15: There will be more other-field (brown/yellow/blue) than greenfield

Will the market start to see SAP as the digital platform for the future? I suspect a momentum build starting but I don’t think it will be hugely sexy yet! Please comment and disagree at will.