Strategic lookout for 2025 – an SAP enthusiast POV

Over the last couple of weeks, myself and Mihir Gor (IBM Distinguished Engineer) were discussing on what have been the evolving patterns and the potential strategic lookout we need to be thinking of as an SAP enthusiast for being able to assist our client on their journey towards Intelligent and sustainable organizations.

That inspired us to co-author this blog to share our thoughts with the wider audience.

Note: This is our individual POV and not related to IBM in any context nor representing IBM thought process as there might be multiple other options depending on the consulting strategy which we do not want to complicate at this point in time. Hence if any further deep dive needed, feel free to reach out to either me or to my colleague Mihir Gor.

Coming to the thought process…

The ERP journey for clients is fast evolving and moving towards composable patterns. From where it was in the beginning few decades back to where it has now been moving towards, it’s a journey which most of us would relate to in our careers. Below is a high-level overview of how this has happened and along with it different patterns which have evolved as well,

To be able to catch up with these patterns, SAP landscape is evolving rapidly with multiple options across different patterns especially with the clean core – lean core thought process and it is important to be fully aware of the dependencies or possible options to consider prior to making any decisions. Below is a quick view of what the evolving SAP landscape looks like as of today

As per SAP’s strategy of “Suite first – AI first” the adoption of RISE with SAP Methodology has become the centrepiece for many of the client transformation journeys. In this blog, we will be focusing on what are the key considerations you need to think through for making sure you have everything you need to move forward.

Clients are working towards the deadline currently for getting their systems planned out for S/4HANA and while doing so around moving the workloads to RISE with SAP for being able to take the advantage of the innovation.

Before we start deep diving into the strategic lookout lets first go through the extended maintenance and around the upgrade versions to be considered by the clients when moving / transitioning the journey into RISE with SAP or otherwise,

Recently, early social media feeds like German media outlet “Handelsbatt” reported that SAP is going to extend the SAP S/4HANA transition timeline to 2033 for customers that sign up for an as-yet unannounced package called “SAP ERP, private edition, transition option”.

This has been confirmed by SAP in Feb 2024 here https://news.sap.com/2025/02/sap-erp-private-edition-transition-option-navigate-complex-rise-with-sap-transformations/

What does this mean for customers with complex transformation requirements?? With this new offering from SAP, they will have 3?additional years of extended maintenance from 2031-2033 to adopt the RISE with SAP contract and formally commit to completing their move to SAP S/4HANA. A pre-condition for this offering is that they need to be on SAP HANA on ECC6 e.g. EHP7-8, as this the only supported database for the new offering. There are still some open questions such as pricing model for this option, and what’s included in the bill of materials since SAP said more details will be announced closer to availability-to-purchase in 2028.?

Some assumptions we noticed:

-??????????? Only ERP 6.0 EHP8 will be supported until 2033 to keep maintenance effort (Release and Kernel)

-??????????? Only HANA systems will be supported until 2033 to raise the HANA revenue

Talking about extended maintenance, let’s look at what does the end of mainstream maintenance support looks like for SAP ERP 6.0 and NetWeaver 7.5,

While the above image provides a summary of the maintenance lifecycle related dates, it is also equally important to consider the change in release strategy from SAP when it comes to the newer SAP S/4HANA versions. Below is a quick summary of the S/4HANA versions and how over a period of time the versions have now been expanded over a certain period of time,

As far as we know, there are no other change for on-prem customers, so the end of mainstream support is Dec 2027 with extended maintenance to Dec 2030, so the vast majority of customers are required to move to S/4HANA before then.?

What about other products in the market? Is it enough to just upgrade S/4HANA or should you look into other products as well?

To answer that we have tried mapping with some of the critical components or functionality being consumed by the clients along with possible options to be considered. Below image provides a summary of the findings and different possible transformation journeys to be considered,

Moving onto the platform part which has been the centre of focus from an SAP innovation point of view – SAP Business Technology Platform, the adoption rates have been staggering so far and only going to be more higher given the new AI driven use cases along with other services being provided to the clients.

Below image provides a summary of some of the adoption rates when it comes to SAP BTP, as per ASUG report Q3 2024. The key point to know is that customer are adopting different BTP capabilities starting with Data to value with SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics cloud to address their challenges around business insights across their business functions and value chains. That being said, we do detect growing interest in AI capabilities with SAP Business AI and SAP Joule integration (e.g. with CoPilot) that will accelerate the infusion of AI across business processes.

Early in 2025, SAP announced an update to their strategy of “Suite first, AI first” driven approach starting with SAP Business Data Cloud as announced in the recently concluded SKOM event, which we will get to know more about in the release sessions coming up on February 13th, 2025.

That said, what would truly be the solutions you should consider when it comes to different functions across phases to deliver the value during the SAP transformations and where is SAP heading in this space?

There are different options mapped across functions such as people, process, applications and data for SAP transformations and while the view below is only one set of recommendation, depending on the client landscape and the use cases in consideration, the tool names might differ accordingly.

Source: SAP PartnerEdge 2025

In addition to the different tools mentioned above for each of the factors as called out, another key question we were trying to deliberate on was around what would be the solutions which would be evolving for clients around the following,

Below image gives the first-hand view of what these system categories would be across each of the items,

Note: This might evolve further as the roadmap progresses, so ensure you refer to the latest roadmap at all times for the updated consideration to be made.

Another factor which has been emerging pretty rapidly has been on how customers can drive the business transformation through the transformation suite listed out by SAP comprising of solutions such as SAP Signavio, LeanIX, WalkMe, Cloud ALM along with few other components. Below image gives a view of how the Business Transformation Management (BTM) suite is driving continuous value for our customers,

Source: SAP

To drive this within the organization much stronger, we strongly encourage you to consider setting up of a proper business transformation office (BTO) with focus on business process management, application management and change management. Below is a sample view of how the organization structure of BTO could look like,

This BTO office based approach with the right technology solutions around SAP Signavio, LeanIX, CALM and WalkMe would immensely help clients deriving the true value of their investment towards S/4HANA, Enterprise Architecture and business outcome driven aspirations.

Prior to moving onto the core focus of AI driven solutions from SAP, let’s look at the latest 2025 predictions for AI and automation to be able to look at what is evolving faster and quicker for being able to relate it to the overall strategy from SAP in this space. Below image provides an overview of what have been the predictions,

Source: IDC Analyst report for AI trends in 2025

But what are the external drivers which could influence these predictions made?

Below are some of the key external drivers to be considered,

1. AI-driven business models — Moving from AI experimentation to monetization
2. The drive to automate — Toward a data-driven future
3. Future proofing against environmental risks — ESG operationalization and risk management
4. AI-driven workplace transformation — Building tomorrow's workforce today
5. Regulatory flux — Navigating compliance challenges in a shifting policy landscape
6. Responsible and human-centric technology — Ethics in the enterprise
7. Battling against technical debt — Overcoming hurdles to IT modernization

SAP in this space for instance already has been releasing multiple components covering SAP Build, SAP Analytics Cloud, AI Agents for complex business problems through SAP Joule, Data Lake capabilities and with Datasphere amongst others. To cover the most recent, SAP Joule is now available on SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition as part of the Early Adopter program for you to be able to take advantage of the same.

Below image provides a summary of the key AI enabled capabilities to look out for in 2025,

As you can see, Joule is going to play a key role in the approach from SAP into most of the products both already available today and with most of the features coming up soon. Let’s see how that innovation highlights summary looks like related to SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition specifically,

Source: SAP

That said, we are eagerly awaiting the earlier announced Joule for Consultants and Joule for Developers, which will transform the LLM driven use cases around Software Development Lifecycle activities. Imagine an SAP specific LLM trained on 200,000+ pages of learning content including graphics and images along with 2 TB+ of community knowledge and best practices.

Using a certain bit of imagination looking at the trend of Agentic AI, what if a user can prompt SAP Joule in natural language to get the below

-??????????? Get Maintenance information across distributed PDF files

-??????????? Getting AI agents spend time for information lookup across systems

-??????????? Reduce the E2E process time

-??????????? Reduce errors proactively

And what if an ABAP developer can generate high-quality code and unit tests via Joule through SAP Build which already is a reality today. Not to forget the Co-Pilot to Joule integration which is available for customers already to take advantage of and to have a unified ways of working established both for organizational data and for SAP driven activities.

To wrap up the AI part, we are sure you already have seen and heard about the disruption through DeepSeek and only looking forward for many more such innovative and differentiating scenarios to come through in 2025.

With the year progressing, we are only going to have much more innovation come through given the era of transformation we are at today and looking forward to seeing this blog laying foundation for the ongoing conversations to happen.

Let’s summarize the key takeaways we have touch based during the blog,

-??????????? Agentic AI is the future to be embedded in business driven scenarios and for developers

-??????????? Assistants spread across the product suite through Joule and other integration scenarios

-??????????? Gain insights both with classic, federated and business data cloud based models

-??????????? Business transformation management driven by Signavio, LeanIX, Cloud ALM and WalkMe

-??????????? Make sustainable decisions and improve the decision-making process

-??????????? Support agile based development and reduce the need for meetings (you heard it right ??)

-??????????? Autonomous self-healing capabilities

-??????????? IT to business correlation for translating to business outcome

Thanks for reading through our POV on how we believe this space is going to be evolving this year. Please do reach out to [email protected] for more information.