Expansion Section: S/4HANA Shelfware
Customers that are live on S/4HANA are certainly more committed than a customer that uses S/4HANA as shelfware, but even these customers had to be evaluated because there are many ways of being “live” on a system. A live system can be a glorified POC, a system some transactions are running through, etc. Normally the definition of a live system is one which the business is relying upon in a substantial way. Yet in interviews with S/4HANA customers, this definition has been stretched. In SAP’s haste to add as many customers to the live status for S/4HANA, they have categorized many customers as live who do not meet the normal definition of live.
While in early 2019, there were over 10,900 “customers” of S/4HANA reported by SAP (roughly 26% being new and 74% being upgrades) the 850 number that is reported by SAP as live is most certainly exaggerated. Here is an earlier quote from SAP.
“Yes, sure. I think Bernstein [ph] as well. But we have over 850 live customers now to just over two and a half thousand projects ongoing, so it continues to be very successful. And as Bill said these customers are also investing in the top product. So this is really a tremendous success story for a city and the more they go live, the more expansion we will see.” – Rob Enslin
The number of go-lives reported changes depending upon the publication. The numbers seem to range from the 200s to the high 400s. Yet, the problem with these estimates is they have all come from entities with a financial incentive to promote S/4HANA. But even if you take the number of 350 live proposed by ASUG in Aug of 2016 implementations as 100% accurate, the question naturally arises, why are so many SAP customers in possession of a license of S/4HANA is so few (comparatively) customers are live. Dividing 350 live customers by 5,800 total customers (the number at the time of ASUG’s estimate) is 6% of the total number customers reported by SAP. There is certainly a lag between the purchase of software and going live with software, but this is a strange percentage that is duplicated with few applications.