Research released by HCL Enterprise Application Services (EAS) has revealed that globally large enterprises could save nearly $30 billion in total through consolidating their instances of SAP. The global survey of 225 CIOs focussed on their organizations’ current and future usage of SAP, revealing that on average they had five separate instances of SAP operating across their business. In fact, more than a third (39%) stated they were running in excess of six instances.
The findings also showed that on average the cost per user, per year of running SAP was $1,518 and by moving to a single instance large enterprises could potentially make savings of up to 25%.
"Many large enterprises have a global SAP footprint, yet have been unable to truly operate in a truly unified manner due to having a fragmented software landscape. For some, there are legitimate reasons for multiple instances such as country-specific requirements. However, for a significant majority it has been a result of mergers and acquisitions or multiple implementations across different areas of the business, which have never been rationalized or consolidated. As the research shows, such an environment can be very costly to support," said Steve Cardell, President of Enterprise Application Services, HCL.
The research also highlighted the prevalence of legacy SAP versions still being used as core operating platforms. The latest version of SAP (ECC 6) is only being used by just over a third (37%) of organizations, while more are using ECC 5 (54%) and SAP 4.7 (44%). This is a further indication that many enterprises have adopted a piecemeal approach towards upgrading their SAP environments as they have expanded their operations.
