The Americas' SAP Users' Group has released its second member survey on SAP's HANA platform, providing a series of detailed insights on how customers are adopting it. (Disclosure: I am a former ASUG employee and helped design the survey prior to joining Constellation Research.) Here's a look at some of the key results, as summarized in an ASUGNews article:
The survey, conducted during September and October 2015, drew 1,253 respondents from a wide range of industry and company size backgrounds. More than 90 percent of the survey respondents self-identified as ASUG members.
In 2014, 40 percent of customers surveyed had bought HANA as compared with this year’s 45 percent. This is a rough comparison, since we are dealing with different sample sizes, but anecdotally, there’s an upward trend.
There’s also plenty of planned HANA investments on track among our 2015 survey respondents. Of those who’ve implemented HANA, we asked if they have additional HANA projects upcoming: 23 percent of the 422 respondents who answered the question said they have one or more projects underway; 22 percent said they have one or more planned and approved; 31 percent said they have one or more planned but not budgeted; and 23 percent said they had no more in the works at the time.
Overall, most HANA engagements went well: 90 percent of the 388 who answered the question said their most recent HANA implementation met or exceeded expectations.
The sample size for this year's survey is indeed much larger than the first one, which drew more than 500 respondents. While improved survey outreach efforts may have played a role, it's also clear many more ASUG members are becoming interested and invested in HANA.
The results for HANA project success are certainly encouraging, but as ASUG S/4HANA Community Advocate Kevin Reilly notes in the full report, part of the reason for this is the "full-court press of support from SAP to ensure success." Still, the fact that 76 percent of respondents to the question have at least plans for another HANA project can't be discounted.
Business Case Blues
In last year's ASUG HANA survey, three-quarters of respondents who hadn't bought HANA said it was because they hadn't found a business case justifying the cost. This year's survey found some, but limited progress on this front:
When we asked respondents who have not yet purchased SAP HANA why they haven’t licensed the platform, 58 percent said it was due to lack of a business case that justifies investment. (We accepted multiple responses, and there were 443 who answered the question.)
Also cited in the survey were budget issues or timing for funding to support a move to HANA (48 percent), followed by not having identified a full set of optimization scenarios requiring HANA (33 percent). After that was a lack of understanding of the SAP HANA roadmap (22 percent), and the need to catch up on SAP upgrades or enhancement packs as a predecessor activity (21 percent).
There are a few other factors hindering HANA adoption. For one thing, there's confusion among customers about the licensing structure for S/4HANA, SAP's next-generation ERP suite, which was launched early this year, Reilly says in the report:
The licensing structure of the unfolding S/4HANA products is currently not well understood. No successful CIO can sleep easy at night without knowing all of the ramifications of the cost/benefit calculations around any product.
Taking the business case and licensing questions aside, there's another hurdle, he writes:
With many companies creating annual capital budgets, they will only seek funding after solving the cost questions. For some SAP customers, the 1511 release will provide answers to the business use questions, but investment in S/4HANA still needs to go through the company budget cycles, which means many customers will not be licensing until later in 2016 or 2017.
In addition, SAP has said it will support customers of the current Business Suite until at least 2025, giving many no immediate reason to make the move.
The Bottom Line
HANA has become a much more mature platform in the past couple of years—with a just-released support pack adding many new features. Although its customer count has doubled to more than 7,000 compared to last year, this still represents a small percentage of SAP's nearly 300,000 customers.
But there's an important question every SAP customer needs to ask themselves, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
"SAP is tying almost all innovation to HANA, may it be via S/4HANA or other projects," he says. "So customers need to ask themselves if they want to stay with SAP long term or not. If the answer to the question is yes, then they need to embrace HANA sooner or later. And as with all new technologies, once they have matured enough—something HANA certainly has done—embracing and adopting them earlier has adoption advantages."
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