, Head of Cloud ERP, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Business Suite for ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Middle East & South Africa, on why the road to the autonomous enterprise still runs through clean core, trusted data, and the people who must live with the change.

Christian Klein gave Sapphire 2026 its most quotable line when he said no AI agent can compensate for a bad data landscape. For the Middle East and Africa markets thatΒ Pieter Van Der MerweΒ covers at ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄, that reads more like a starting gun. Van Der Merwe advises customers across the UAE, a region split between government-mandated agentic AI in the Gulf and parts of Africa still securing their first foundational cloud workloads, yet all staring down the same 2027 ECC deadline.

, he gave a working practitioner’s view of the market. He was candid about where RISE programs stall, why the first year is organizational change wearing a technology costume, and why prized customizations are often historical workarounds in disguise.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄insider: ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s Africa messaging has intensified throughout 2026, and the autonomous enterprise framing surfaced early from MEA leadership. Is this a pivot, and why does the idea land here first?

Pieter Van Der Merwe: Africa has always been a growth market; what changed is the convergence of cloud ERP, business AI, data sovereignty and skills development. Some African enterprises carry less embedded legacy customization and can move faster. Others run highly customized environments built over years around payroll, procurement, and financial reporting.

The framing of a business that can sense, decide, and act with minimal human intervention resonates here for practical reasons, including resource constraints and the opportunity to leapfrog rather than replicate the mature-market journey. The opportunity is around clean cloud ERP, trusted data and embedded AI as the foundation for more agile, competitive organizations.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Africa and the UAE are in very different places. What does a realistic autonomous enterprise roadmap look like for these regions in 2026?

Van Der Merwe:Β It starts with the unglamorous essentials such as modernizing the core and fixing the data foundation. Our CEO, Christian Klein, noted at Sapphire 2026 that no AI agent can compensate for a poor data landscape, so good data is the prerequisite for everything else.

The near-term value lies in the embedded AI scenarios that already live in RISE, such as finance automation, HR workflow and supply chain exception management. These are switched on inside existing ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Cloud environments. The agentic layer arrives as the foundations mature. The African and Middle Eastern organizations well-positioned in 2028 are the ones investing in that foundation now, even when the autonomous vision feels distant.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i:Β When a customer commits to RISE, what do the first 12 months look like, and where does it diverge from expectations?

Van Der Merwe: The first 12 months are a business transformation program disguised as a technology migration. The technology, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ S/4HANA Cloud, infrastructure, and licensing are relatively straightforward. The depth of organizational change, such as how people work, how decisions are made, and how processes are structured, catches organizations off guard. Without governance and stakeholder engagement, even the best platform underdelivers.

The most common divergence is data readiness. Poor-quality, inconsistent master data surfaces early and erodes user trust, which is hard to recover from. The second is customization. Organizations underestimate how much of the current configuration is genuine business logic versus historical workaround, and that distinction is decisive for clean core. One welcome change post-Sapphire is that RISE customers get three Joule Assistants activated in their first year, giving a tangible AI experience during the foundational phase.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Post-Sapphire, are customers feeling more urgency on the 2027 ECC deadline, or using the AI vision as a reason to pause?

Van Der Merwe: The 2027 deadline is real. ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ has made it clear that ECC customers who commit to migrating most of their landscape to ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Cloud ERP gain access to select AI scenarios in the interim, so there is a bridge. The best-placed customers when agentic capabilities mature are those already running clean-core ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ S/4HANA, because that is the foundation the autonomous suite is built on. Waiting for the full vision before starting the foundation is the wrong sequence. If anything, the bigger risk is reorganizing priorities too ambitiously and trying to tackle everything at once.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Clean core is the prerequisite for everything ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ promises, but in heavily customized landscapes, it can feel like undoing years of work. How do you win a buy-in?

Van Der Merwe: By reframing what those customizations represent. Some encode genuine differentiation, process logic that reflects how the business truly operates, and deserve to be preserved as extensions on  using clean-core methodology. But much of the customization in mature landscapes is a historical workaround, through integration patches and decisions made under time pressure decades ago.

The conversation must involve finance, operations, and process owners. The framing that works is forward-looking: what does clean core unlock, specifically the AI scenarios now in RISE, and what does it cost to keep maintaining the current complexity? As support deadlines approach, that calculation changes sharply. The people dimension matters too. Teams whose identity is built around managing customized systems need a new value proposition of supervising AI-augmented processes rather than wrestling with complexity.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: The autonomous vision depends on trusted data and standardized processes. How prepared are organizations, and are some underestimating the foundational work?

Van Der Merwe: Both are genuinely hard, and neither is solved at contract signing. Data readiness is the most underestimated challenge. ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s platform response- ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Business Data Cloud (BDC), Knowledge Graph and the Reltio acquisition- is meaningful, but zero-copy sharing and semantic enrichment do not substitute for master data governance.

Process standardization is the other half. The autonomous suite is built around standardized, cloud-aligned processes, so organizations that customized for years face a real renegotiation. The most forward-thinking organizations treat it as an opportunity to redesign processes for the AI era, rather than replicate old ones in a new system.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Where do RISE programs most commonly stall, and what separates the customers who push through?

Van Der Merwe: The stall points cluster in three areas: data-readiness failures that force unplanned remediation; change-management breakdowns where the business disengages and IT drives alone; and integration complexity across mixed ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ and non-ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ landscapes. Those who push through have the qualities of change leadership, such as engaged executive sponsorship, quick decision-making governance, and a willingness to standardize where standardization is available. The technology is mature and stable; the implementation process and organizational alignment are where programs succeed or fail.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Joule was positioned at Sapphire as ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s new front door. What does it mean for a customer mid-journey on RISE?

Van Der Merwe: Customers should be thinking about Joule now, even if full deployment is progressive. The positioning of Joule Work is a significant UX shift. For customers mid-journey, the practical question is which Joule capabilities are already available in their current RISE configuration and whether they are activating them, because the embedded scenarios and early assistant capabilities do not require a completed transformation. The broader Joule Work experience, across web, desktop, mobile and voice, moves to general availability in H2 2026. That timeline is closer than many realize.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ has more than 295 AI-powered scenarios embedded across its applications. Which are getting real traction, and which are still promising on paper?

Van Der Merwe: The strongest traction is where AI is embedded directly into existing workflows, and the value is obvious: finance, HR, procurement, supply chain, and customer service, because they involve high-volume processes and measurable outcomes. Think faster financial close, guided buying and invoice processing in procurement, demand sensing and exception management in supply chain.

Where a use case stays more promising than practical, the problem lies with the customer environment. If data is fragmented, processes are inconsistent, or governance is immature, even strong AI struggles to deliver value at scale.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: The autonomous enterprise means AI executing actions humans perform today. How are the most forward-thinking customers approaching the human side?

Van Der Merwe: Organizations must treat AI as a work redesign strategy, not a replacement strategy. Employees move from repetitive execution toward supervision, exception handling, judgment, and continuous improvement. People must understand why the organization is changing and what skills keep them valuable, or AI copilots become another layer nobody trusts or uses.

It also demands reskilling, like learning to work with AI, interpreting its recommendations, and escalating exceptions where accountability still rests with people. The most mature organizations build cross-functional teams across business, technology, operations, compliance and change. The principle is simple: autonomous does not mean human-free. It means people focus on higher-value work while intelligent systems handle the repetitive and predictable.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: Have you seen the RISE-to-autonomous journey deliver something genuinely different from previous ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ transformation cycles?

Van Der Merwe: The example of IBM migrating from ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ ECC to ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Cloud ERP Private across 175 countries and more than 150,000 users in 18 months is instructive. The move contributed to over $4.5 billion in productivity savings. What is different in this cycle is the speed and scope. A transformation at that scale would once have taken far longer, and the AI tooling now applied to the migration itself, reducing effort by up to 35% on ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s own figures, is part of that story.

In advanced deployments, the qualitative shift is from static reporting to active intervention. What feels genuinely new is the convergence of data, AI and process in a single governed environment, delivering systems that learn and adapt in real time.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄i: What is the one piece of advice you would give to a CIO or IT director in the Middle East and Africa navigating the 2027 deadline and autonomous vision?

Van Der Merwe: Do not treat these as separate issues. The 2027 deadline, the move to cloud ERP, and the autonomous enterprise are the same strategic decision: How ready your organization is for the next decade. The immediate priority is to modernize the core and fix the data foundation, because without it, AI stays trapped in isolated use cases. Then focus on business value: the processes where AI can protect revenue, improve cash flow, reduce risk, or unlock capacity. Do not modernize for technology’s sake.

Finally, bring people in early. This is as much a leadership, skills, and operating model shift as a technology one. My strongest advice is simple. Start now, start with the core, and build a roadmap that integrates migration, data, AI, and people into a single transformation agenda.

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According to Pieter van der Merwe, Regional Sales Director for Platform and Technologies at ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Africa, the majority of CEOs remain concerned over the quality of their business data despite the gains made in investment into new technologies.

β€œWithout access to accurate data across the entire organisation in real time, business leaders are unable to make accurate decisions. This can create disconnects in the customer experience, employee experience and product experience, which can erode trust over time and chase customers and talent away to competitors.”

One Gartner survey found that only 8% of organisations had reached ’transformational’ levels of maturity in their data and analytics. A separate study by the Harvard Business Review found that only 3% of company data meets the minimum threshold for data quality.

β€œIn these volatile and uncertain times, organisations need to ensure they take every step to build and maintain trust with customers, partners and employees,” says van der Merwe.

β€œThis is impossible when the underlying data is inaccurate or not reflective of the organisation as a whole or any part thereof.”

In a 2019 CEO survey by IDC, respondents stated that digital trust programs are the most important agenda item over the next five years.

According to the survey,Μύ.

Half of the world’s two thousand largest organisations are expected to name a chief trust officer by 2023, while two-thirds stated they would request a formal trust initiative by 2025.

β€œThe heightened levels of trust needed in our near future means traditional approaches to building that trust need to be re-evaluated,” says van der Merwe.

β€œThe growing complexity of modern business environments means organisations need to deploy new tools and technologies to help maintain the integrity of business processes to engender trust between the organisation and its various partners, employees and customers.”

In 2019, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ introduced BW/4HANA, a completely revamped version of ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Business Warehouse that runs on the ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA in-memory database. The platform provides a range of powerful functions, including:

• Data integration of multiple data sources and data types.
• High levels of data quality; stream processing which, when combined with HANA provides a foundation for real-time analytics.
• Spatial functionality that supports location analytics at the core of applications ranging from mobile advertising to IoT.
• The ability to capture relationships between different data sets to uncover unique insights.
• Text analytics that can support AI applications such as natural language processing, understanding and generation.

β€œCustomers around the world are using ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ BW/4HANA to support their analytic needs and consolidate large volumes of data from both ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ and non-ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ sources in near real time,” says van der Merwe. β€œΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA and ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ BW/4HANA enables organisations to build and maintain trust by ensuring they work from trusted, connected and intelligent data that they can rely on.”

According to van der Merwe, organisations can realise benefits across three key value areas, namely:

Reducing data complexity

By empowering organisations with the ability to view, access and use all their data in one trusted and unified landscape, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s data warehouse portfolio simplifies data management across the organisation.

Ensuring data is connected and intelligent

By delivering intelligent, connected data, organisations gain real-time analytics about live transactions and vast data sets without the need for mass data duplication. ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ is the only technology provider that enables in-memory transactions and analysis on a single data set.

Avoiding vendor lock-in with an open system

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for data management. Organisations need an open and flexible data system that can work across on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄β€™s data warehouse portfolio gives organisations complete freedom in how they deploy data management for systems, applications and development.

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According to Pieter van der Merwe, Regional Sales Director for Platform and Technologies at ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Africa, the growing complexity of modern businesses requires new tools and strategies, however.

Modern organisations need instant access to real-time data across all operations and tools to mine that data for insights that can improve how those organisations are run,” Van der Merwe said.

β€œThe growing importance of customer experience makes it critical to also track, measure, and integrate experience data to gain a holistic view over the total performance of every part of the organisation,” he added.

Growing fears

In PwC’s latest COVID-19 CFO Pulse Survey,Μύ,Μύwith 51% saying they are concerned about the impact of the global economic downturn.

β€œOrganisations across Africa are having to deal with immense disruption, growing complexity, and challenging operating conditions,” Van der Merwe noted.

β€œRelying on outdated technologies, manual processes and slow, cumbersome legacy infrastructure has the potential of derailing efforts at building back better following the initial impact of the pandemic and resultant lockdown measures.”

β€œOrganisations need to utilise all the data assets at their disposal to optimise business processes, improve the customer experience, create new opportunities, identify and mitigate risk and ensure all operations are integrated end-to-end for a complete view of the organisation,” Van der Merwe said.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ supports organisations which wish to achieve this by transforming their data management capabilities through the deployment of its market-leading HANA platform.

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA is an in-memory, columnar database management system that combines transactional and advanced analytical workloads on diverse data, whether physically or virtually connected.

Massive return on investment

A recent IDC study found that organisations which had deployed ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA to identify and deliver innovative use cases had achieved an average five-year return-on-investment of 679%.

HANA empowers real-time decision-making, enables the development of intelligent custom applications, and leverages data to create unique new services that better serve customers.

Van der Merwe said ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA helps organisations turn business data into real value by delivering on three critical areas.

1. Building connected processes and experiences

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA can help to connect processes and deliver engaging experiences by embedding integration, data management, and intelligence across all business applications.

This helps simplify and optimise complex processes, reduces reliance on intermediaries, and integrates end-to-end business processes for impactful experiences that deliver greater returns on investments into other technologies.

2. Enabling confident decisions with integrity

By ensuring accurate, comprehensive, and secure data, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ can help organisations make decisions with confidence and integrity by moving from data analytics to intelligence.

This helps deliver fast and accurate insights into the organisation, powers real-time decision-making based on trusted data and accurate context and provides a holistic view of the organisation that enables more accurate and comprehensive planning.

3. Powering continued business innovation

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA also integrates intelligent technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, and advanced analytics – and helps organisations connect processes and experiences to help them make decisions confidently.

This enables continued business innovation across the organisations, which can reduce churn by making new connected experiences quickly available to customers, partners, and employees.

The post How ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA Can Turn Your Data into Business Gold appeared first on ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Africa News Center.

Modern organisations are faced with the daunting task of collecting, storing and analysing vast amounts of data and deriving insights from that data that inform decisions and lead to improved business outcomes.

The large volume of data means this is no easy feat: by 2025,Μύ, equivalent to more than 212 million DVDs every day.

Organisations are dependent on technology tools to collect, reconcile and rapidly process data to deliver insights into the performance of the business.

In 2010, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ released what would be a game-changer for real-time data processing and insights generation: its in-memory relational database management system ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA.

β€œΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA sits at the heart of our business applications, including our flagship business suite ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ S/4HANA,” said Pieter van der Merwe, Regional Sales Director for Platform and Technologies at ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Africa.

β€œIt is designed to help organisations make sense of a broad range of data types and make accurate decisions in real time thanks to the integration of intelligent technologies. Organisations can use ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA to embed real-time machine learning into business processes to empower them with predictive capabilities, while integration to the ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ Analytics Cloud gives organisations confidence to make accurate end-to-end business decisions.”

In a recent study by IDC, organisations that are using ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA to achieve business gains and operational efficiencies had on average achieved return on investment of 679% over a five-year period, achieving revenue gains of $34.1-million per organisation.

β€œOrganisations use ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA to enable the development of intelligent custom applications and increase the pace of innovation in a cost-effective way by simplifying the management of data, and improving access to data and insights,” said van der Merwe. β€œBy leveraging data, organisations can more easily identify new opportunities for revenue growth and create new services to better meet customer demands.”

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA is used by more than 28,000 organisations around the world to analyse complex data and deliver actionable insights in real time through custom applications and innovative use cases. According to Beveridge, ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA delivers business value along four key areas, namely:

1. Risk mitigation

By reducing the impact of outages on users and business, organisations can achieve higher business productivity and minimise revenue losses.

The IDC study found thatΒ HANA users achieved 21% higher gross productivity for users.

2. Improved IT team productivity

ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄ HANA enables custom application development that substantially improves the productivity of developers and database administrators, withΒ up to five times higher productivity and an 18% gain in database administration efficiency.

3. Reduced operational costs

By leveraging HANA to identify inefficiencies and gaining a deeper understanding of expense structures, organisations can lower their operational costs andΒ make savings of more than R15-million ($845,800) per organisation per year.

4. Higher levels of business productivity

The IDC study found that leveraging data in innovative use cases for custom applications increased revenue and improved employee productivity levels while reducing business operational costs.Β Β through higher revenue, increased productivity and lower costs.

β€œIt’s critical that organisations leverage their data to drive competitive advantage,” said van der Merwe. β€œWith the world in a state of widespread disruption and constant change, having the benefit of accurate data over the total performance of the business and developing insights in real time can mean the difference between growth and decline, success or failure. The tools we need to navigate this uncertain period are already available: organisations now need to take the bold step of empowering their decision-making with the powerful business technology platform from ΒιΆΉΤ­΄΄.”

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