Decoding SAP Sapphire 2025: What’s New, What’s Next, and What’s Unresolved

At SAP Sapphire 2025 and the Financial Analyst Conference, SAP sent a decisive message: the future is cloud-first, AI-powered, and driven by an expanding partner ecosystem. But the real question is whether SAP’s vision aligns with your organization’s priorities, and how to separate bold ambition from near-term business value.

In this blog, you’ll learn:

• SAP’s top strategic announcements at Sapphire and how they measure up to UpperEdge’s forecasts
• Critical gaps SAP left unaddressed
• Key issues SAP customers must monitor going forward

Reflecting on Our Sapphire Predictions

Prior to the event, we published a guide for maximizing value from SAP Sapphire 2025, where we outlined key areas attendees should focus on heading into the conference. Now that the dust has settled, it’s worth reflecting on how SAP’s announcements aligned with those predictions.

AI Took Center Stage

As predicted, AI dominated the agenda, with Joule and agentic AI at the heart of that narrative. The debut of Joule Studio provides organizations with the ability to design and tailor their own AI solutions. SAP also underscored its growing innovation ecosystem, spotlighting strategic partnerships with Databricks, Deloitte, Diamond AI, Perplexity, and WalkMe.

While SAP showcased their aggressive use case and partnership expansion and custom build opportunities, the balance between aspirational AI and actionable value still leaves room for improvement.

Cloud Migration: Reducing Friction, Raising Expectations

As predicted, cloud migration took center stage, with SAP spotlighting enhancements to BTP and RISE aimed at eliminating cost and complexity barriers.

We also advised clients to pay close attention to Jan Gilg, SAP’s new CRO for the Americas. He acknowledged the financial and operational hurdles of cloud adoption and positioned himself as a customer advocate with “skin in the game.”

Gilg made it clear he intends to be a collaborative leader customers can rely on. Now it’s up to Gilg and his team to prove they can deliver on that promise.

Suite as a Service: Simpler Story or Just New Packaging?

We advised customers to monitor the evolution of bundled packages and commercial flexibility. At Sapphire, SAP highlighted its refreshed Business Suite and “Suite as a Service” model, designed to challenge “Best of Breed” IT strategies. They also introduced more out-of-the-box AI, industry content, and simplified contracts.

Despite CEO Christian Klein acknowledging the growing commercial complexity, SAP unveiled even more offerings for customers to navigate. Our experience shows SAP’s sales team often struggles to clearly communicate these evolving value propositions, yet customers are still expected to keep pace.

Sales Momentum and Growth Levers Unveiled

Before Sapphire, we predicted SAP would highlight strong sales momentum and a positive outlook, and that proved accurate. SAP continues to make significant progress in cloud adoption, revenue, backlog, and operating profit. At the Financial Analyst Conference in Orlando, SAP reinforced this growth trajectory with a clear strategic roadmap focused on five key initiatives:

• Converting on-premise customers to cloud, projecting a 2-5x revenue increase over existing support
• Shifting clients from private to public cloud, aiming for a 20% revenue boost
• Increasing app adoption by expanding customers’ cloud solutions to four or more through cross-sell and upsell
• Launching a robust pipeline of new offerings and innovations
• Expanding small business reach by assigning 400K accounts to resellers

Together, these levers are central to SAP’s plan to sustain momentum and capitalize on market shifts.

Overall, our Sapphire 2025 preview accurately captured SAP’s strategic focus, but the event highlighted ongoing gaps between SAP’s ambitions and the immediate needs of many customers, especially those not yet on the cloud journey

What SAP Missed and Why It Matters

Although half of SAP’s customers still run on ECC, the company focused almost exclusively on cloud-only features and innovations, offerings many in its customer base cannot yet utilize. We have previously emphasized the need for SAP to provide clearer support options to help on-premise customers plan migration timelines and roadmaps. Yet, while showcasing its cloud progress, SAP offered little practical or actionable guidance for ECC and S/4 on-premise users, leaving a significant portion of its customers with unanswered questions.

Additionally, although SAP highlighted its AI advancements and acknowledged migration challenges, it fell short of delivering a clear, compelling narrative on how AI is enabling partners to accelerate implementations, reduce costs, and enhance transformation efficiency.

Strategic Questions for SAP Customers Post-Sapphire

With Sapphire behind us and the year at its midpoint, these are the critical issues SAP customers should monitor as the company shapes the rest of 2025 and beyond:

1. Pressure on On-Premise Customers: Cloud or Else?
   SAP’s cloud push is accelerating and its often at the expense of on-premise users facing rising maintenance costs, waning innovation, reduced executive focus, and looming end-of-support deadlines. The question is not if SAP will increase pressure, but how far they’ll go and what new levers they will pull.
2. Public Cloud Push: Strategic Shift or Commercial Play?
   How will SAP’s pivot toward public cloud, with its higher revenue potential, reshape the RISE go-to-market strategy that has historically favored private cloud deployments?
3. Repackaged Cloud ERP: Flexibility or Lock-In?
   SAP’s revamped ERP bundles under the “Suite-as-a-Service” model raise questions about enterprise agility: will these offerings deliver genuine modular flexibility or impose new commercial constraints?
4. AI at Scale: Promise or Proven Value?
   SAP’s rollout of numerous Joule AI agents and an “omnipresent” copilot signals ambition, but are enterprises ready to adopt these innovations at scale before clear ROI and operational benefits are established?
5. Business Data Cloud: The Next Big Bet or a Bold Bluff?
   SAP is betting heavily on Business Data Cloud as a future leader in data analytics, with CEO Christian Klein highlighting a strong early-stage pipeline. Can SAP convert this momentum into broad adoption and establish a market-defining platform?
6. SLA Competitiveness: Earning Trust or Charging for It?
   Facing growing customer pressure, will SAP modernize its SLAs to align with industry standards or continue treating them as premium upsells?
7. Leadership Accountability: Real Change or Rhetoric?
   SAP’s new Americas leadership promises advocacy and shared risk. Will this translate into genuine, transparent, customer-centric engagement or remain polished rhetoric? Their plans to enhance Sales and Marketing, including a new quoting tool to streamline negotiations, also raise the question: will customers see faster, smoother experiences?

Final Thought

Wherever you stand in your SAP journey, the rapid pace of innovation and continuous release of new offerings demand your attention. Navigating these updates alone is challenging, especially given SAP’s own acknowledgment of its complex ecosystem.

To learn how UpperEdge can help cut through the noise, evaluate true impact, and define the smartest path forward, explore our SAP Advisory Services.