Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Paul Saunders

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Paul Saunders.

This month, we feature Paul Saunders. Paul is Head of Product Strategy and Chief Evangelist for Cloud ERP at SAP. As such, he has his finger on the pulse of all the new innovations in SAP’s locker. Prior to SAP Paul was a Vice President for research and analysis for Gartner.

Thanks so much for joining us, Paul. Our readers may not have come across you in the past. Please can you give us a brief introduction?

Really nice to be here. As you say, I’m the head of product strategy for ERP at SAP and also the chief evangelist. That is a very fancy title that basically means that I talk about ERP a lot. I’m originally from Birmingham, England but lived most of my adult life in the US. Over a decade ago, my family and I decided to move to Scotland, and we absolutely love it here. 

What sparked your initial interest in SAP technology, and what keeps you passionate about it after all these years? 

In the 1990s I was living in California and working as a software developer at a fibre optic company. I was a C and C++ programmer, though I have a soft spot for Borland Delphi. The company I worked for was fairly small, so I was part engineer, part IT-guy. A combination of writing code for Optical Power Meters and OTDRs and fixing printers and changing backup tapes. 

One day the owner of the company announced that we had been acquired by a huge conglomerate. Next thing I know I’m asked to work on an R/3 project, migrating from Sage Mas 90. 

I then spent the next 20 years in between IT and software engineering with a decade as a CIO for several US companies and CTO for a Scottish University.

I’ve always loved technology, but the passion is for what technology can do. I still love to be able to point at a product and say, ‘I helped make that.’

You are currently Head of Product Strategy at SAP. Sounds pretty exciting and fast paced. What does that role involve?

“Strategy is the discipline that sits above all others. Strategy is about how to win. Strategy has the potential to lift us repeatedly and sustainably from the ugliness of a brute force world.”

That is a quote from, what I consider to be, the best book on strategy – the Essence of Strategy, by my former Gartner colleague Dave Aron. 

Strategy is often poorly understood, viewed as a mix of vision and mission statements, organisational charts, product roadmaps, aspirations and random cherry-picked data. It is often the Rachel Green trifle of disciplines. 

I always try and come back to Dave’s quote – it is about how to win. For my team and me our focus is always on how we can help our customers win. In order to do that we have to always start from the customer’s perspective. What are they trying to do? What differentiates them to their customers? What does a day in the life of one of their employees, partners, customers etc. look like in 5 years? How can we at SAP help them get there?

The wonderful Tony Fadell in his book Build says, and I’ll paraphrase, “your product isn’t only your product. It’s the whole user experience. Don’t tell me what’s special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

So our job in product strategy is simply to improve the customer journey – or as Dave so eloquently puts it “lift us from the ugliness of a brute force world”.

During your time at SAP and Gartner, what was the most significant shift you observed in how enterprises approached ERP strategy? 

One of my favourite research notes I co-authored at Gartner was entitled “On Time, On Budget, Fully Functional, and Disappointing.” This is because at Gartner we saw so many organisations treating ERP as an IT project. When this happened there was a huge expectation gap between what was technically delivered and what was expected by the business stakeholders. Contrary to popular opinion, most ERP programmes are not failures. Of course, the big high-profile failures make the papers, but they all have similar root causes: Lack of executive support, poor programme leadership, unclear objectives, inadequate change management, insufficient focus on data, internal politics and so on.

The shift to cloud was of course huge, as is the current shift to AI. The biggest shift however has been the shift from viewing ERP as something that tech teams ‘do’ to something that transforms, optimises and powers business.

That said ERP is still the prog rock of the business app world. So incredibly uncool that it is only really loved by weirdos with beards. Hence my appearance. 

SAP is moving really fast at the moment, and the direction of travel seems to be towards cloud ERP, either private or public cloud. What factors come into play for organizations when considering going “public” or “private” in their ERP strategy?

I used to give a presentation when I was at Gartner where I said “there are only two challenges when it comes to Cloud ERP – 1) what do you mean by cloud? And 2) what do you mean by ERP?”

As an industry we often over complicate things. In 2025 cloud is a given. There will always be the odd exception based on regulatory requirements, connectivity, or something, but by and large the direction of travel has been cloud for a while now. 

The main deciding factor between public and private is around the customer’s reality of adopting standardised processes. Most of what any business does, irrespective of industry, size or geography, is exactly the same. Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Tax, Treasury, Onboarding, Developing, Offboarding, indirect procurement, etc. These are all incredibly important, but they should be standardised and optimised. The goal is to focus your time, effort and money on what differentiates you to your customers.

For complex customers it can be too much of a challenge to adopt standardised processes in one go. 

My recommendation is to get a big white board. On the right-hand side write down the top goals for the organisation – these are probably on your website in the ‘about us’ section. So let’s say that you have a goal to become the number one supplier of sheet steel in North America. What are the metrics that you will measure that by? Market share, revenue, profit, customer satisfaction are probably all part of it. 

If you want to increase revenue, then you might need to be able to offer faster delivery. This will then involve better logistics, better warehouse management, more efficient manufacturing, better inventory management and so on. Better does not necessarily mean bespoke. The goal is to only diverge from the standard when it has a real tangible business value to do so.

Once you’ve identified your systems of differentiation everything else should be standardised. In Private Cloud we refer to this as a Clean Core approach.

Public cloud SaaS is increasingly the choice that companies make. But this does not mean that it is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than Private cloud. It is all about what is best for your business. 

How has the SAP contracting market changed since the acceleration of cloud adoption, and what skills should consultants focus on developing?

The best consultants that I’ve worked with during my career all have the same qualities – empathetic, challenging, trusted, and knowledgeable. Dave Aron has a wonderful term that I use all the time ‘humble disrespect’. Consultants need to have a humble disrespect for themselves and their clients. They need to be able to be empathetic and challenging at the same time. 

We used to have this horrible term, I believe created by the US Army in the 1960s – ‘soft skills’: Communication, leadership, empathy, adaptability etc. Those aren’t soft skills – those are skills. 

Technical skills are one dimensional – you simply have to have them. It’s no good being a surgeon with a wonderful bedside manner but no knowledge of whether that fleshy bit is the kidneys or the liver.

In your role as an ERP evangelist, what's the most challenging aspect of helping organizations understand the value of cloud transformation?

The biggest challenge is that cloud has been viewed, communicated, and promoted as a set of technologies, rather than an enabler of business success. It is the old Ted Levitt challenge – “customers don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole.”

My team and I spend a lot of time getting organisations to focus on outcomes and business value. There is a time and a place for the technology conversations, but they shouldn’t be the starting point. 

Based on your experience, what critical factors separate successful SAP cloud implementations from troubled ones?

It isn’t vendor specific. I’ve seen some of our competitors raked over the coals for failed implementations yet the exact same software, the same business capabilities, same processes are used at thousands of other companies very successfully. Success always comes down to:

Executive commitment
Organisational change leadership
Clarity and alignment on goals
Data quality
Agreement on systems of differentiation
Governance
Integration
Absence of politics.

The last one is always the hardest. It is why public sector, local government, higher education are always such a challenge. The level of politics makes it almost impossible to change how things are done – it’s like trying to run through quicksand.

Let’s talk BTP. It seems SAP has a fantastic product here, which allows partners to plug any gaps with their own approved solutions, seamlessly integrated to S/4HANA through BTP. Is this a fair assessment of SAP’s strategy to enrich their core product with help from selected partners?

Geoffrey Moore in his book ‘Crossing the Chasm’ talks about the Whole Product Approach. A company doesn’t want ‘ERP’. They don’t want CRM, AI, Cloud etc. They want and need to be able to ship a product or provide a service by a specific date, to a specific customer, at an agreed price and quality. 
The value of SAP is in our ecosystem. It is unmatched in the industry. BTP is the platform, the integrator, the orchestrator, the automator. Our customers can get most of what they need to succeed from our portfolio of products and services. For everything else our partners and customers work together using BTP, using SAP Build, Signavio, LeanIX, WalkMe and more to enable the ‘whole product’.

How do you see AI and machine learning reshaping the SAP ecosystem over the next five years? 

Everyone has read and/or heard hundreds of people with more expertise than me extol the value and virtues of AI and ML. This is a huge evolutionary step, and maybe even a full blown coup d’etat in how business is done. 

The SAP ecosystem is remarkably adaptive and innovative. How software is created, how it is delivered, how companies run, how customers buy will all change. They already are being changed. In 2020 I co-authored some research at Gartner on what we were calling ‘AI generated composite applications’. This is very similar to what we now refer to as Agentic AI. This is the most exciting change in business applications in my career. I think the SAP ecosystem will be leading here.

Looking ahead to 2026-2027, what capabilities do you predict will become must-haves for SAP cloud ERP implementations?

I think many of the things we have already talked about will still be considered must-haves. Executive commitment, governance etc. The biggest change will be around getting ready for the unknown. Donald Rumsfeld was widely mocked for his ‘unknown unknowns’ speech, but it was incredibly prescient. We know what we know and we can intelligently guess some of the known unknowns. The critical capability will be to build a foundation today for the unknown unknowns. We have to be like Mendeleev, who left gaps in the Periodic Table of Elements for the things not yet discovered. That is the purest example of humble disrespect that I can think of.

And what about the cloud ERP roadmap for the next 5-10 years. Can you give us an overview of what SAP will be focusing on?

The future of ERP is the future of business. It is when they become out of sync that the problems arise. Our focus will be on what business will look like over the next 5-10 years. Will we work the same way (in offices, shops and factories), with the same tools (mobile phones, laptops, meeting rooms), with the same people? Will industry demarcation lines be the same? 

Christian Klein I think summed it up best in an interview last year:

“you cannot transform a company just by implementing new technology. This is key.…….you have to change how people work, how we code software, how we deliver software, how we sell. 
    And the same is true for all of the industries in some shape or form. And then it’s a cultural change.
    It’s also about the openness to mindset and to really do things differently.”

You describe yourself as a “failed rock star”. I’d love to know the background to that. Also, if you had to create a rock anthem about SAP cloud migration, what would be the title, and which classic rock song would you base it on?

I started playing guitar the same year I programmed my first computer. 1981. I was 11 years old. Music is everything to me. Always has been. I played in a band in NYC for a number of years in my early 20s and then worked in the industry for a few years, paying my way by doing odd IT jobs. 

Looking at recent videos of David Yow of The Jesus Lizard, Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys and the ever-incredible Patti Smith, I think there is still hope for my music career yet. Age is not a limit.

SAP cloud migration song – I would think it would have to be a version of Zeppelin’s “What is and what should never be” – perfect description of adopting a clean core approach.

What about Paul outside of work? Do you time for hobbies and interests?

We live in the middle of nowhere in Scotland so my wife and I hike a lot. I also ride a mountain bike and try and stay fit – not because I like exercise, but because I have an ego and level of vanity that is much greater than a man of my age and appearance should have. 

I love reading, playing guitar and tattoos. 

And the question we always like to ask our experts: what would be your advice to new SAP consultants, or existing SAP consultants in the market now?

Humble disrespect. Empathy. Be the trusted advisor that your clients need. They need your help and guidance, but you also need to learn from them. And don’t forget about your health and your family – they are your real core system.