Another year gone and 2019 just arrived a couple weeks ago. Now it is a good idea to see what happened in the SAP Ecosystem in 2018 and what 2019 will bring:

What happened in 2018

• Biggest new of the year was the acquisition of Qualtrics by SAP. As you may now it was the biggest acquisition by SAP and it is still unclear what SAP will do in the future with it.
• Companies started using SAP Leonardo but in my opinion it didn’t meet SAP expectations.
• SAP Cloud Analytics was huge! More and more customers are using instead of using SAP BusinessObjects. During the last year SAP released tons of features of the platform.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud received 4 different releases. On the contrary SAP S/4HANA On-Premise received only 1 release. I think it is quite clear what SAP thinks about On-Premise systems, right?
• SAP Cloud Platform and the new paradigm of developing and selling applications by partners though it. The relationship between partners and customers is changing…
• GDPR became enforceable in May 2018. Are your SAP systems compliant?
• Big Data is trending and SAP Vora is still SAP choice for working both with HANA and Big Data.
• AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform… You named it. On Cloud systems are the future believe it or not.
• SAP Fiori is the new black. The old UI from SAP Portals and Web Dynpros are gone and everything is brighter in the Fiori side.
• SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Cloud Analytics… SaaS was not as important as it is right now in the SAP Ecosystem.

What will be important in 2019

• SAP Fiori 3.0 is almost here but nobody knows when it will happen. Expect new flavors and beautiful UIs 🙂
• XOData is the new data. What is it? Nobody knows but Bill McDermott and Ryan Smith are its prophets.
• More S/4HANA. Like it or not S/4HANA is the future so I hope you already migrated your old SAP ERP systems or at least have a plan to migrate them before 2025…
• SAP CoPilot, also known as a way to talk with your S/4HANA.
• Do you want to write your S/4HANA too? Try SAP Inscribe.
• SAP Analytics Hub: A SaaS to rule them all. Web Intelligence, Lumira, SAP Analytics Cloud…
• Kubernetes for SAP Applications. Will we see SAP Netweaver running under docker in the future?
• Bye bye SAP Enterprise Portals! Hello SAP Portals in SAP Cloud Platform!
• In-memory databases are in for the last years. Time to migrate to SAP HANA from your old traditional database!
• HANA 2.0 is the new flavour of HANA and it is compatible with SLES 15!
• AWS, Azure and GCP to be compatible with more SAP Products. Remember kids, not everything you run On-Premise can run On-Cloud!
• Blockchain. Nobody knows if it is still in or out but I’m still waiting for its application with traditional SAP Products. Maybe this year?
• SaaS, IaaS and PaaS are not enough. Expect CaaS (Container as a Service) and FaaS (Function as a Service) to be the new acronyms that everybody uses but nobody knows their meaning.
• Keep an eye on SAP Cloud Platform and SAP S/4HANA Cloud but don’t forget the old and important On-Premise systems. If you are still thinking about On-Premise or On-Cloud is time to change to Hybrid.

I will probably forgot a lot of things but I think it is a good start. In my opinion 2019 is going to be an interesting year, it seems that the idea of SAP is to enhance and continue developing S/4HANA while releasing new products as SaaS, CaaS or FaaS.