Users await the fine print on SAP Business Suite reboot

SAP users have asked for transparent discounting and commercial arrangements following the business app giant's relaunch of Business Suite and extended alliance with Databricks.

Under the strategy Business Unleashed, SAP this week announced the relaunch of Business Suite as a "truly modular, composable" set of cloud applications. Through its agreement with Databricks, the analytics and machine learning platform provider, SAP is also launching a managed set of analytics products across all business processes including finance, procurement, and HR, integrating data from SAP applications.

German-speaking user group DSAG - which represents SAP customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland - welcomed the move to relaunch Business Suite but called for transparent discount scales based on the number of modules a customer chooses to buy.

The name will be familiar to longstanding SAP customers and partners. SAP Business Suite 7, for example, was launched in 2006 and includes the ERP application ECC6. The vendor is set to end mainstream support after 2027 and extended support after 2030.

Speaking to journalists this week, Jan Gilg, chief revenue officer for the Americas, said: "You might remember we had an SAP Business Suite 20 years ago in our on-prem world. Now we are launching the SAP Business Suite as a truly modular, composable cloud suite.

"Over the last couple of years, we've brought together our various applications - some through acquisition - that came with different technology stacks. We have spent significant effort not only to integrate business processes but also to harmonize the data model. Now the cost center in [ERP system] S/4HANA, for instance, is the same as the cost center in [expense management software] Concur. Those solutions can talk with each other seamlessly, but also from a UX integration, technical properties like joint provisioning, and so on."

Thomas Henzler, DSAG board member for sales, production, and logistics, said customers could previously not always benefit from buying everything from SAP as a single source, describing this as a major disadvantage.

"This often meant that solutions from other manufacturers were also purchased in tenders. The customer always had to negotiate individual deals with SAP, for example, for customer experience or procurement solutions.

"There was a lack of transparency as to what commercial advantage the customer actually gained from purchasing everything from SAP. In addition, purchases from the past were generally not taken into account for discounts in new deals."

He welcomed the move to integrate products, but said SAP should also address the problem of commercial transparency.

"Like an insurance policy, the customer should benefit from buying several SAP products. There should be a corresponding discount scale that makes transparent the number of SAP solutions purchased for which discount," Henzler said.

In its data platform with Databricks - formally the SAP Business Data Cloud - SAP aims to offer "insight apps" that use analytics tools and AI models connected to real-time data from applications to provide insights and planning capabilities across a range of business activities.

Sebastian Westphal, DSAG chief technology officer, said: "The implementation will now depend on which insight apps SAP will offer, when and under what conditions, for example, with what added value, at what cost, and with what requirements. The contractual and operational complexity is not yet foreseeable. We expect that extensive information will be provided and system access will have to be clarified - especially in the event that SAP takes on operational responsibility here."

The suite will support bi-directional data sharing between SAP Business Data Cloud and third-party data platforms, but only with Databricks' Delta Lake open table format "as the initial delivery."

Other vendors including AWS, Google, Snowflake, and Cloudera - all of whom have broad data and analytics portfolios - favor the rival table format Iceberg, which originated at Netflix.

"Over time, we plan to support additional data platforms and table formats," SAP said in a statement. ®