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Digital Transformation in 2024: P2P With AP Automation

Preface Nearly all clients are seeking greater prosperity in 2024. While client organizations are still focused on cost reductions to meet the challenges of their new economic and market realities, the pent-up demands of the business are increasingly calling for innovation, automation, and organizational performance improvement. We foresee a volatile and unpredictable business landscape predicated on geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and continued supply chain disruptions as client organizations continue to diversify their technology supply chains, but digital transformation continues to be an investment area. Digital ...

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SAP Announces Price Hikes Just When Enterprises are Cutting Costs

Steven Zolman
May. 18,2023 | SAP

SAP, the German software giant, recently announced a price hike in its software products and services, much to the disappointment of its user base. This comes at a time when businesses are already grappling with rising input costs, slowing sales forecasts, and concerns about continued economic headwinds. As reported by The Register, SAP customers are not happy with this decision as it comes at a time when many are already struggling with their budgets. Many businesses are experiencing financial challenges, and SAP's decision to raise prices will only add to their burden. This move is seen by many as bad form on the part of SAP, and it has ...

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Qualtrics: SAP’s Latest Deal ‘Stalking Horse’

SAP customers are facing some difficult and well documented hardships of late, especially those still on the Slow Road to HANA. For many, the migrations have become far more than was originally bargained for. As we have stated in previous articles, SAP’s greatest Cloud success has been in its acquisitions like Ariba, Concur and SuccessFactors. On their own, SAP has struggled. While SAP touts it’s 100% growth in S4/HANA Cloud growth and backlog, for customers, the story is far different as underutilization and adoption woes rule the day for a huge number of them. Given customers are facing these challenges, SAP continues marching forward with ...

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Calling All Budget Heroes: Seven Strategic Supplier Strategies for Year End

As we've been saying for months, post (hopefully) pandemic Market Conditions are ripe for you to act in driving business value into your company. If you've ever dreamed of being the budget hero, this is it. With the tumult in the supplier marketplace around M&As, shifts of products to the cloud, small company disruptions, the supplier competition has never been as robust. Once you digest the list below and want more, we're happy to talk. There's nothing we like better than chatting about how to get more value from technology suppliers - especially now. Big Software SAP Nearly 100% of SAP deals come due in December. This is driven by ...

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WILL “RISE WITH SAP” BE YOUR DOWNFALL?

Michael Welsh
Feb. 18,2021 | Software SAP

SAP CEO Christian Klein is in a tough spot, trying to minimize the damage of a brand that has lost ground to competitors who have better adapted to the new reality of cloud computing. This exposure has been amplified during the global pandemic and has negatively impacted SAP’s profitability in a time when other companies are prospering due to customers’ increased dependency on technology and automation. In an attempt to remedy these challenges and re-focus his brand, Klein is promoting a new program for ‘business transformation as a service’, dubbed “RISE with SAP”. SAP plans to migrate your ERP to its cloud, promising to improve and speed ...

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Going Back to School on SAP Licensing

Unbelievably, it’s been four years since we published an article titled: Top Questions to Ask When Taking the Slow Road to SAP (S4) HANA. And despite that passage of time, not much has really changed about SAP’s predictability. We outlined six considerations to weigh before investing further in SAP’s vision of the future. The intent of that article was to invoke questions that would cause SAP customers pause and consider both short- and long-term issues that may have been considered foregone conclusions related to S/4 HANA. There is a famous saying that every history teacher probably says a hundred times a year to students, “Those who fail ...

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Breaking Bad: The Big 5 HCM Suppliers

According to MarketWatch, the global HCM market size in 2018 was $12.6B USD and is poised to grow to $22.6B by 2025! That is an impressive growth number and companies will be going all out to claim their share of it. While these ‘Big 5’ take up a massive chunk of the HCM market, the biggest piece of the pie is still quantified as ‘other’, meaning there are a myriad of options for enterprises to choose from. Before you can even consider the niche players and startups on the cutting edge of HCM technology, you first have to know what the big players can do. They will claim they can do everything under the sun, but in some cases that’s only ...

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Top 10 Audit Crazy Suppliers: 2019 Version!

Software audits have become an unfortunate but necessary revenue stream for most suppliers today. And who can really blame them? It usually works! Just as governments have now come to rely on revenue from things like speeding and parking tickets, so to have software companies come to rely on software audits to move the needle on revenue or generate fear, using pressure and leverage to create opportunities for new licensing revenue. The reasons are well known, and really haven’t changed significantly in the last few years: Competition from disruptive suppliers Migration away from perpetual licensing to subscription-based cloud solutions ...

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SAP at Year End: Pitfalls and Opportunities

Michael Welsh
Nov. 28,2018 | SAP

December is the busiest month of the year for many suppliers, including of course SAP as they look to shore up, lock up, and secure their end of year financials. A vast majority of SAP contracts renew effective January 1. There are both opportunities to be had and pitfalls to avoid in this end of year run to 2019 and beyond. Below we outline just a few things to look out for and encourage you to chat with us to make sure you are getting the most out of your agreements, investments and relationships with SAP. SAP has its share of challenges. There is discontent amongst its partners, customers, and previous cheerleaders. SAP’s cloud roadmap is ...

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SAP Maintenance and Support for the Zombie Hordes

As many of you may already know, most SAP renewal deals ‘come due’ in December, as they are generally annualized to the calendar year, as are most new SAP license purchases and expansions. SAP is hungry for new licensing revenue, so customers can expect to see increased activity around year-end audits. Now is the time to start planning (and saving), especially if you’re already paying for annual maintenance and support services from to SAP. If you are ready to go ahead and write SAP another huge check for the upcoming year and are unconcerned about the value you’re getting for these large investments, check your pulse…you may be a software ...

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