Bring your own identity (BYOI) is an innovative transformation designed to enhance interactions with SAP’s digital platforms. Our vision is to enable straightforward digital interactions and processes for customers from their initial contact to known user status, consistent across all digital touchpoints and cloud products.

This approach will be implemented without the constraints of scaling, performance, compliance, and security issues inherent in legacy identity management systems.

Customers and partners adopting BYOI will gain complete control over user management, ensuring smooth integration and increased security. They can tailor identity and access management setups to their specific needs while ensuring compliance and mitigating risks of data breaches in a cloud-ready environment.

This initiative represents a strategic enhancement designed to improve interactions with SAP’s digital platforms by allowing customers and partners to connect their corporate identity providers with SAP. Our development teams are actively working on its implementation to make authentication more efficient across all SAP touchpoints.

To facilitate this transition, we are optimizing our identity and access management systems for seamless registration and integration of corporate identity providers. This will enable customers and partners to use their existing corporate credentials, providing unified access to both corporate applications and the SAP ecosystem.

We are undertaking these comprehensive changes to meet the growing expectations of our customers and partners for a modern, secure, and cohesive digital experience with SAP. This effort is crucial not only to ensure up-to-date security, but also to provide smooth user interactions and build trust across our digital platforms. The goal is for customer identities to be onboarded once and utilized across all SAP products and digital services, enabling secure and compliant management of authorizations.

Implementing BYOI is a detailed process. To ensure a smooth transition, we are planning a pilot phase with a selected group of pilot customers starting in the third quarter of 2025. Following the pilot, we will aim for a global rollout later in 2026. This phased approach will help refine and perfect the system to better meet the needs of all users worldwide.

The target audience for the global rollout includes all customers and partners equipped with their own corporate identity provider and prepared to embrace BYOI.

Join an SAP Continuous Influence program session here to share detailed ideas and requirements on BYOI, S-user management, and SAP Universal ID, ensuring clarity and effective review by SAP (an S-user is required to submit improvement requests).

Inge Marg is product manager for Customer Identity Management at SAP.