More than half of SAP users in the UK and Ireland are looking to SAP’s cloud offerings to reduce costs and speed deployment times.

According to a survey by the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, 58 percent of SAP users are currently using or planning to use SAP’s cloud offerings.

Respondents to the survey said that barriers towards adoption SAP’s cloud offerings include existing investments in on-premise applications (57 percent) and a lack of clarity surrounding SAP’s product roadmap (52 percent).

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SAP users also question the company’s acquisition strategy and 44 percent said they not understand where the acquisitions of SuccessFactors, Ariba, Fieldglass and Concur fit in to this broader roadmap.

“Over the last 18 months, we have seen more of our members looking to move elements of their SAP estate to the cloud. However, as the survey results show, users still face challenges when it comes adopting SAP’s cloud offerings,” Paul Cooper, vice-chairman of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group said in a statement. “For organizations that have heavily invested in on-premise applications in the past, there still needs to be an attractive business case for them to move to the cloud. If users are to fully realise the benefits of SAP cloud offerings, they need to understand the company’s roadmap and strategy. For instance, the survey highlighted that just over half (52 percent) of respondents were unsure that S/4HANA would make them more readily consider using cloud services from SAP in the future.”

Of the SAP users planning to adopt cloud offerings, 39 percent of users plan to adopt SAP Cloud for Customer, and 23 percent planned to use S/4 HANA enterprise cloud edition. S/4 Hana Cloud was launched last year at the company’s SAPPHIRE Now customer conference. The cloud edition has functions for finance, accounting, controlling, procurement, sales and more.

The survey results come as SAP has announced a major partnership with Apple where the companies will deliver a new SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK exclusively for iOS. The platform will provide users the tools to build their own apps for iPhone and iPad based on SAP’s open platform as a service.