After more than five years, I had the opportunity to attend SAP Sapphire this week in Orlando. Coming back to this event—especially as our organization embarks on our own S/4HANA program—was both grounding and forward-looking. It reminded me how much the enterprise technology landscape has evolved, and how some foundational ideas are now coming full circle.

In the early 2000s, SAP thrived by convincing enterprises to adopt a unified suite—the SAP Business Suite—over fragmented, siloed systems. That strategy worked. Standardized processes, enterprise-wide data, and tight integration delivered measurable business value. CEMEX, the global building materials company where I spent 15 years leading SAP implementations, was an early beneficiary of this approach.

But as cloud and data integration technologies matured and modular architecture principles took hold, enterprises shifted toward best-of-breed stacks—choosing specialized solutions that delivered depth and agility in specific domains.

Fast forward to 2025: SAP is making a bold attempt to flip the script again—this time driven by the imperative to enable enterprise-wide AI.

SAP executives, led by CEO Christian Klein, told IT and business leaders attending this year’s SAP Sapphire event that by tapping into SAP’s “flywheel” combination of the broadest suite of enterprise apps, context-aware data, and world-class Business AI, they can conquer uncertainty.1

This year’s Sapphire centered around SAP’s renewed strategy of “Best-of-Breed as a Suite.” Powered by an enhanced cloud ERP offering and underpinned by generative AI and semantic data models, SAP is positioning its platform as the most viable foundation for AI at scale. The rationale is clear: AI thrives on context, and context requires clean, connected, and harmonized data—something fragmented tools often fail to deliver.

Christian Klein’s keynote highlighted this shift, along with key announcements around Joule (SAP’s AI copilot), new verticalized application packages, and continued investment in the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAP is no longer just modernizing its suite—it’s reimagining it to be smarter, modular, and cloud-native.

Notably, the acquisitions of Signavio and LeanIX are becoming more strategically integrated, giving SAP a business process and architecture knowledge base that supports AI-powered micro-transformations. This reflects a shift from monolithic implementations to intelligent, data-informed process optimization at scale.

Still, one critical question remains: Can any vendor truly deliver both “best of breed as a suite” without significant compromise?

Today’s enterprise buyers are used to domain specific best-in-class capabilities—Salesforce for CRM, Coupa for procurement, o9 for Integrated Business Planning, Workday for HR, Snowflake for business data-lake house. The bar is high. SAP of course dominates the ERP landscape, having “SAP customers represent 40% of global economy”. SAP and others must prove they can not only promise seamless integration, but deliver comparable (or superior) functionality across domains—with acceptable trade-offs.

The pressure is on SAP to show that its vision is more than cohesive—it must be compelling both at the edge and at the core.

For organizations like ours in a consumer packaged and distribution businesses, understanding the direction of major platform players is critical to architecting a future-ready enterprise. I believe data will be the differentiator—and our architecture decisions must support an AI-powered future. SAP’s platform-centric strategy resonates with that belief, but success will depend on execution.

Final thought: The platform wars are heating up again—but this time, the battleground is AI enablement and the data fabric that powers it. SAP has made its move. Others are on the same accelerated solutions evolution journey. Let’s see who leads. Let’s see who wins.

1-https://news.sap.com/2025/05/sap-sapphire-companies-facing-big-challenges-we-are-on-your-side/