SAP with Inzenius Delivers Payroll Compliance
The most pressing issue for SAP users is complying with their legislated payroll award conditions.
On top of this, SAP is attempting to retire its clients from their pre-SAP S/4HANA custom-built systems and to save time and investment by not binning the ERP platform, but rather by integrating a best-of-breed option.
Given the urgent need for payroll compliance, the best option today could be to integrate Inzenius into your SAP environment, thereby saving substantial time and costs while lowering the risk of Award Non-Compliance at a tailored cost that fits into the budget at this time
Incognitus took such a step and is extremely satisfied with the process and outcome
“Fortunately, we found Inzenius; its integration with SAP was seamless and fully met our operational requirements in terms of best value and lowest operational impact. Thanks to the platform’s flexibility, Incognitus’s business processes aligned effortlessly with SAP’s financial workflow. This not only resolved our integration issues but also enabled u s to operate with a level of certainty and efficiency we had not achieved before.” Grant Sumners, CFO Incognitus
Article extract from the Register Magazine By Lindsay Clarke
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/19/sap_2b_off_target/
SAP’s grand cloud escape plan €2B short of the runway by
Strategy launched after 2020 share price crash is 24% behind target
Five years after launching its rescue plan to lift ERP users to the cloud and switch them to the latest software, SAP is off target by about €2 billion, The Register can reveal.
Users reliant on SAP’s legacy ERP software – including global businesses such as Airbus and BMW – are facing the end of mainstream support in 2027, but the German software giant has already changed its stance on support deadlines. As it misses migration targets, some experts see a change in emphasis.
In October 2020, SAP CEO Christian Klein promised a new strategy after cuts to its sales and margin outlook caused a 23 per cent share price crash.
Speaking to investors, he said it would involve “accelerated technical migration of our customers’ most important business applications to the cloud” in a platform powered by SAP S/4HANA, the in-memory database.
The following January, SAP introduced customers to the new plan called RISE with SAP. For starters, RISE with SAP promised a lift-and-shift of complex SAP environments into public, private, and hybrid clouds. In addition, it planned to move users of ERP software older than S/4HANA onto the latest in-memory platform launched in 2015. Third parties signing up to the plan included Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, Cognizant, and Deloitte Consulting, as well as cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Early last year, it emerged that SAP may have strayed off target. Figures from the end of Q4 2024 showed only 39 percent of worldwide ECC customers – from a total of 35,000 – had bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to SAP S/4HANA. The figure was up marginally on the 34 percent recorded for the same quarter a year earlier.
These are the most recent figures available on ECC migration. Last year, SAP replaced RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition with SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition, creating confusion over licensing. The move also made it more difficult to compare like-with-like in terms of reported migration figures.
On-prem support revenue shows cloud migration behind schedule
However, since SAP bundled cloud migration and ERP upgrades together, on-prem software support revenue – which relates almost exclusively to ERP with a small chunk of data warehouse software – acts as a proxy for cloud adoption. As cloud revenue goes up, on-prem software support goes down because support is included with cloud revenue. SAP already knew this.
In 2022, then-CFO Luka Mucic told investors that for 2025, SAP wanted to see €8.5 billion in support revenues, down from around €11.5 billion in 2021, as users move from on-prem licenses and support to cloud subscriptions. But the 2025 full-year figure for on-prem software support is €10.5 billion, down only 7 percent from 2024’s €11.29 billion. That’s €2 billion off where SAP wanted to be, or about 24 percent more than it should have been. Between 2021 and 2024, the category only fell 2 percent.
In fact, Mucic, who left SAP in 2022, told investors in 2020 the company would be “arriving fully in the cloud come 2025.” With €8.5 billion in on-prem software support revenues for that year, SAP is a long way from where it said it would be, whichever way you measure it.
As well as the carrot of an in-memory database, and promise of “innovation” only with S/4HANA in the cloud, SAP has the stick of ending software support. Mainstream support for ECC ends in 2027, while extended support is available at a two percent premium until the end of 2030.
Business case still a barrier for legacy users
The question is why are some customers so reluctant to give up on their ECC software? The most straightforward answer is that they don’t see the value. Last year, Freeform Dynamics’ survey of 455 CIOs, senior-level IT roles, SAP specialists, and business managers found 95 percent of legacy users say building a positive case to migrate requires a big effort or is genuinely challenging. The research echoes concerns shared by user groups and individual users over the last five years.
This may be down to the mantra that this is not a software upgrade. Ideally, SAP expects users to rid their ERP software of any customization built for ECC and move to S/4HANA and the cloud with a “clean core” on which they can build extensions using the cloud-based Business Technology Platform (BTP).
In a sense, users are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Organizations that take too many of their ECC customizations to S/4HANA will struggle to keep pace with mandatory software upgrades and won’t have sufficient agility to access SAP innovation, limiting benefits. But users going for the “clean core” approach face re-engineering processes that might have been habituated among thousands of end users for a decade or more, which can take as much work as the technical migration, adding to costs and timelines. Either way, it’s difficult to get the justification to add up.
Kingfisher – which operates 2,000 European retail stores including UK brands Screwfix and B&Q – has rejected SAP’s migration plan. The company told a Gartner conference last year that it had moved its ECC system to the cloud, with third-party support from Rimini Street. It is building automation, AI, and data analytics around the ERP system through partnerships with Google and Databricks.
Gartner has predicted that by 2030, more than 10,000 SAP customers will continue to support major parts of their business with solutions based on SAP ECC, with the larger, more complex organizations over-represented in this group.
A survey by DSAG, which represents users in German, Austria, and Switzerland, found that of ECC users, about half would continue investing in the legacy system beyond the support 2027 deadline.
“The point here is that a lot of members actually have a plan,” Hungershausen said.