There’s also a lot of noise about agents replacing traditional interfaces outright. Talk to the people actually running mission-critical operations, and you get a different picture. Nobody serious is letting an autonomous agent operate freely inside a production SAP environment, and nobody serious is planning to any time soon. Instead, they’re asking two much narrower questions of every vendor: can this platform give an agent the context it needs and let it act safely within limits? Does the platform add value an agent couldn’t produce on its own? Strip away the AI framing, and this is an outcomes conversation wearing new clothes: fewer incidents, faster audits, and less unplanned weekend work.

The SAP deadline nobody can ignore

For the SAP ecosystem, there’s an added forcing function. Solution Manager exits mainstream maintenance at the end of 2027, and it isn’t going alone. SAP Process Integration and Process Orchestration, both still built on the older NetWeaver stack, are retiring on the same timeline, with Cloud ALM and the Signavio portfolio positioned as the replacement. That’s a genuine architectural change, moving from an on-premises, monolithic management layer to a modular set of cloud-native tools connected through SAP’s Business AI Platform.

Every enterprise running SAP has to rebuild part of its operations toolchain regardless of what else happens in the market. The smart ones are using that forced migration as cover to consolidate around fewer, more open platforms rather than replacing what they had piece for piece. The less smart ones are treating it as a like-for-like swap, migrating their old Solution Manager processes into Cloud ALM without questioning whether those processes should exist in their current form at all. That’s a wasted opportunity. When you’re forced to rebuild the toolchain anyway, that’s exactly the moment to ask which parts should stay proprietary to SAP and which parts should sit in an open, vendor-neutral layer instead.