SAP extends sentences with two years for legacy ERP customers

Over the past year, more and more companies who are looking for enterprise resource planning (ERP) that suits their business needs and delivers value are choosing IFS over SAP.

The deep expertise that IFS possesses in core industries, with a pragmatic approach to make solutions easy to adopt, use, upgrade and effective to operate in combination with leading innovation around emerging technologies is being praised by the customers transitioning in full alignment with reports from leading analysts (Gartner, IDC, Forrester). The IFS approach is always pragmatic; we understand that when customers adopt our solutions we become members of an ecosystem of solutions, technologies and assets within the customers environment, and we are open by default with native APIs and access to pre-built connectors for a myriad of solutions and technologies.

Yesterday legacy ERP vendor SAP attempted to stop more customers from transitioning by offering a two-year extension of its deadline to force its customer base to SAP S/4 HANA. While extending support for its Business Suite 7 software to 2027 may sound like a customer friendly move, it doesn’t really solve the fundamental reason why customers are transitioning away from SAP.

Legacy SAP customers engage with IFS because they need technologies that can help them drive digital transformation and navigate through critical inflection points for their business.

Incentivizing customers to stay on their legacy SAP solutions does nothing to help and support them – on the contrary – it removes customers from being able to navigate through strategic inflection point and benefit from modern solutions in doing so.

SAPs 2025 deadline has been a wake-up call for many customers; it has shone light on the importance of ERP in digital transformation projects, and a two-year extension to the deadline won’t change that. It will however once again, remind SAP customers of the importance of transitioning.

We are now in 2020; customers need dynamic, flexible technologies and solutions that work together across their business, enabling them to successfully navigate through the strategic inflection points that digital disruption forces everybody to face.

I know from talking to our customers who are former SAP users, that time-to-value for their SAP projects was typically 3-5 years compared to a 15- month average for IFS projects.

IFS is here to help customers be successful in their industries and we certainly don’t like to see SAP customers getting two years added to their sentence.

#SAP #S/4HANA #ERP #2027 #SAPSentence #proudlyIFS