valantic SAP Study 2026

The SAP Study 2026 by valantic shows: The transformation of SAP landscapes has reached the implementation and stabilization phase in German-speaking countries. Around 70 percent of the companies surveyed are currently migrating to SAP S/4HANA or have already completed the process.

The transformation is moving through the market segments: While larger organizations started earlier and are gradually going live (65 percent of completed projects), the proportion of ongoing implementations among SMEs has risen from 17 to 25 percent year-on-year.

Extended brownfield/bluefield conversion remains the most frequently used migration strategy in this year’s SAP study at 47%, but is declining overall (previous year: 57%). In contrast, brownfield (18%) is gaining preference and could develop into a new “ERP comfort zone”, particularly in combination with the private cloud.

In terms of the cloud, the focus shifted to actual project experience in the SAP Study 2026, as the number of ongoing implementations and already productive SAP Cloud ERP systems increases. The evaluation of the technology is differentiated in the transformation phases of implementation and operation.

Financial ambivalence prevails among respondents during migration. For example, 42% expect more cost efficiency from the cloud, while at the same time a majority fear high project costs and complexity. Industrial sectors in particular are struggling with high integration costs and a high degree of process individuality.

The SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) will establish itself as the central reference point for data management in SAP landscapes in 2026 and will play a key role in the transformation roadmap at an early stage. 66% of companies already see SAP BDC as an integral part of their future data management at the planning stage in order to enable data-based decisions across the entire organization.

In terms of industries, approval is particularly high in the food and retail sectors. Here, 78% and 72% of companies respectively consider SAP BDC to be central to their data management. In contrast, the figure in the manufacturing industry is 58%, which reflects the mostly complex IT and data architectures with numerous connected production systems, plants and machines.

When it comes to data integration, the second key benefit of SAP BDC, every second company expects the platform to simplify system integration and reduce data silos.

In the SAP study, approval is growing particularly strongly among SMEs (up 28 percentage points). As a lack of integration is increasingly recognized as a problem, SAP BDC is gaining acceptance as a standard solution. In the enterprise segment, approval rises to 52 percent. At the same time, the use of comparable architectures outside the SAP portfolio is decreasing significantly. This underlines the tendency to link the data strategy more closely to the SAP target architecture as soon as the ERP transformation is complete.

With the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and SAP BDC, SAP landscapes are developing in the direction of platform architectures for data, processes and innovation.

Fewer experiments, more operational benefits: With the desire for clear business added value such as process acceleration, cost savings and better problem analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) is clearly business-relevant for companies in the SAP context.

A total of 67% of respondents in the SAP study are already using the technology or have even firmly integrated it into their processes – the latter particularly in the automotive industry and companies that have completed their cloud ERP transformation. Only three percent are still completely inactive in this area.

SAP solutions in the area of Business AI and beyond are the technological basis for the integration of AI and robotic process automation (RPA) for more than half of the respondents – particularly in the food industry, retail, the financial sector and utilities.

When it comes to specific AI solutions, companies want SAP and its partners to provide AI agents in particular (42% demand), i.e. systems that can take on tasks and execute processes independently. Other priorities are AI-supported planning and analysis, AI support for developers and AI functions integrated into SAP applications; the latter is particularly in demand in logistics (around 70 percent) as well as in discrete manufacturing, the automotive and pharmaceutical sectors.

Even if the potential of AI is increasingly perceived as a significant economic and operational lever, its wider use is heavily dependent on security, governance and strategy issues. IT security risks are the biggest obstacle, followed by legal and regulatory uncertainties. Our SAP Study 2026 shows that technological capabilities alone are not enough – clear governance structures, regulatory orientation and organizational anchoring are required.