A shocking revelation has been made by HCL Research. According to the report, $39 billion of SAP landscape could move to the cloud in the next two years, as large enterprises plan to migrate 46% of their existing SAP on-premise environment. The global survey of 100 executives from large enterprises focussed on their current and future plans to deploy SAP applications and infrastructure in the cloud. It revealed that 45% of organizations have increased their SAP cloud investments over the past year and that they expect to nearly double these investments in the next 12 months. Migration isn’t just being motivated by potential cost savings, as the research highlights business agility and speed (59%), access to new technologies (46%) and improved customer satisfaction (43%) as big drivers.
"These findings clearly demonstrate that there is a market shift towards moving a greater proportion of existing SAP environments to the cloud. Improved business agility and speed is, undoubtedly, a big driver, as is the growing maturity and availability of new cloud-based technologies. For those organizations looking to refresh their existing estates, reduce cost and access HANA-powered applications SAP’s cloud offerings are an attractive proposition. In fact, 56% of organizations stated that they expect to use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud in the future," said Steve Cardell, President of Enterprise Services and Diversified Industries, HCL Technologies.
The survey also revealed that SAP's Cloud Extension policy, which enables the partial termination of existing on-premise software licences and associated maintenance costs, has made moving to the cloud a more attractive prospect for nearly three-quarters (74%) of organizations. These findings are perhaps unsurprising given that 30% of organizations said their existing investments in on-premise and legacy systems had been an inhibitor to moving more SAP applications and infrastructure to the cloud.
