New research by Ensono revealed the impact of skills shortages on SAP applications and how they were managed. At a time where many organizations are looking to migrate to more powerful public cloud infrastructures, the lack of skills has slowed them down immensely.

Indeed, it was found out that 70% of UK IT leaders believe that moving SAP to the public cloud will be more beneficial than keeping it on private cloud or on-premises and thus looking to go on the public cloud.

However, most of the SAP applications are still on-premise. The research reported that 35% of participants believed that SAP skills would be an obstacle when migrating their SAP portfolio from on-premise as well as 35% believe that public cloud skills would be the same impediment. On the other hand, 29% say that a shortage of skills was the real issue.

So far, only 4% of IT leaders have migrated their SAP to the public cloud. Most companies have postponed or canceled it or haven’t even started making plans due to SAP and public cloud skills shortage.

Hence, it is quite clear that slow migration to the public cloud is due to the skills shortages that IT leaders are facing. Moreover, IT leaders have also to how they will support it. Indeed, in-house SAP skills are expensive and underutilized.

If a solution is not found about the skills gaps, it is possible that many organizations abandon the SAP portfolio altogether.  As for now, 14% are planning to completely move off the SAP ecosystem over the next three years, while 15% are considering reducing their SAP application portfolio.

Overall, almost 1/3rd of businesses aim to reduce or abandon the SAP ecosystem.