6 out of 10 SAP customers would not buy SAP again

What this seemingly bad number really tells us …

At Nucleus Research, we’ve been stressing the importance of usability for more than a decade. Cool tech features are great, but they have no value if end users can’t take advantage of them. Yet we see a number of technology vendors continue to push trendy new ‘speeds-and-feeds’ and promising future roadmaps with little to no mention of usability and the customer experience.

Case in point, SAP. Once a technology giant, this enterprise software company was slow to embrace cloud computing and still struggles to offer solutions comparable to its competition. It’s been advancing new paths to the cloud and better ways to run software for years. The latest direction is HANA, an in-memory platform for next-generation applications and analytics, according to SAP.

And SAP has been actively promoting HANA through marketing, media and especially with the help of select industry analyst firms. In fact, they continue to work their magic into leader quadrants. Despite press releases citing HANA momentum, we’ve continued to get questions from end-user companies asking about the ROI and value HANA can deliver.

In fact, a number of Tech Adviser clients asked us specifically how companies are actually leveraging HANA and benefiting from the platform. That led us to take a closer look with a series of in-depth interviews of 40 current SAP customers combined with an analysis of data from more than 200 customers that had evaluated SAP as a potential vendor over the past few months. The results were surprising.

Six out of 10 customers said they would not buy SAP again. This was consistent across most products including CRM, ecommerce, HCM, collaboration and analytics. Even more telling, nine out of 10 ERP customers said they are not considering a future investment in S/4HANA. In all fairness, the majority is satisfied with the current ERP solution from SAP, but expressed reluctance to move to HANA.

To be clear, I’m not saying that HANA is bad. This is not about the architecture, features or advantages that SAP’s latest platform play offers. This is about the customers and what we are hearing loud and clear is a strong concern in migrating to HANA. If that fear is unfounded, SAP is doing a lousy job educating its customer base and prospects on why HANA is better. Or perhaps they’ve offered too many platform directions in the past.

Most likely, customers are not seeing value with a move to HANA. And all the marketing, great press and glowing industry analyst accolades in the world will not help if customers are not convinced. Customers are on the frontline and have the pulse of the industry. They provide invaluable insight that can help to predict success. A smart vendor might even listen to such feedback and develop products that end-user customers demand.

This is why Nucleus Research bases our research on end-user customers and real-world cases as opposed to product feature presentations and flashy roadmaps alone. It’s why our tech predictions are so accurate and how we help vendors that are open to honest feedback align their offerings to client needs.

HANA may very well be a good platform for digital business. Everyone seems to know this but the customers. I wonder how successful SAP could be if they included that customer experience piece into the equation.