JYSK, GBM, DIFARE Group and Plastilene Group accelerate their business and drive ERP modernization through SAP Cloud ERP Private on IBM Virtual Server

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and IBM today announced that global enterprises JYSK, GBM, DIFARE Group and Plastilene Group have selected SAP Cloud ERP Private solutions on IBM Power Virtual Server to modernize enterprise resource planning (ERP) workloads in secure, reliable and scalable cloud environments.

Spanning retail, technology services, pharmaceutical and manufacturing, these clients are among the tens of thousands of businesses that run SAP landscapes on IBM Power servers.

According to a recent study from the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), modernizing ERP workloads is essential for driving AI adoption and business growth, with companies embedding AI into ERP systems achieving up to 27% higher ROI. Leveraging SAP Cloud ERP Private on IBM technology can support customers as they scale on-premises ERP environments to the cloud and accelerate AI-enabled business workflows.

The platform delivers a flexible hybrid cloud environment, which can help organizations:

• Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud ERP operations, supported by the ability to scale granularly to match business demand and leverage IBM’s global cloud infrastructure, designed to be highly resilient.
• Migrate to SAP Cloud ERP Private and to the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application as part of the SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) solution, securely, quickly and with minimal disruption, including support for hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments.
• Mitigate operational and security risk, through IBM Power’s enterprise-grade resilience and integrated IBM Cloud security and compliance protection.

Modernizing ERP Workloads in More Secure, Scalable Cloud Infrastructure Across Industries

Known for its high security, scalability and reliability, IBM Power servers are ranked as one of the top servers for uptime and availability among SAP-certified infrastructure, engineered for fewer disruptions and faster migration, supported by the highly resilient and secured IBM Cloud platform. These clients are rapidly migrating on-premises SAP software systems to the cloud, modernizing business processes and becoming more agile:

• JYSK, the international home furnishing retailer based in Denmark, is advancing its global modernization journey with IBM and SAP. With more than 3,600 stores in 50 countries, the retailer needs its SAP software landscape to be more secure, scalable and future-ready to enable it to keep up with the demands of its global business. JYSK has a long history with IBM technologies and continues to work with IBM to advance in their RISE with SAP journey.
• DIFARE Group, a leading pharmaceutical manufacturing company based in Ecuador, required a robust, secure and scalable infrastructure to modernize its SAP software landscape and support critical business operations. As long-term users of IBM Power servers, DIFARE Group continues to place its confidence in IBM technology and has expanded into RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server to help move to the cloud faster and more cost effectively.
• Plastilene Group, an innovator, developer and manufacturer of flexible film solutions in Colombia, chose IBM technologies to modernize its SAP software landscape. With the ability for the solution to deliver better TCO, Plastilene can continue its focus on growth and regional diversification.
• GBM, a leading IT services company in Central America and the Caribbean, is focused on improving agility, scalability and real-time insight to better support its customers. By leveraging IBM technology curated for SAP Cloud ERP Private to help gain reliability, security and high performance, GBM is creating a strong foundation to adopt SAP software innovations and drive continuous transformation across the organization.

Industry-Leading SAP-Certified Infrastructure Enables Cloud Modernization

“As enterprises modernize, the journey to SAP Cloud ERP Private is dedicated to helping on-premises customers of SAP ERP tailor their transformation and bring business applications, data and AI together with SAP Business AI Platform. Some of these customers are now modernizing their cloud ERP landscapes and advancing their cloud ERP digital transformation strategies with SAP solutions on IBM Power Virtual Server,” said Lalit Patil, CTO for RISE with SAP and Head of Cloud Lifecycle Engineering and Operations, SAP SE.

“Organizations across industries are accelerating their move to SAP Cloud ERP Private and require a trusted cloud platform designed for mission‑critical workloads,” said Hillery Hunter, General Manager for IBM Power, CTO, IBM Infrastructure. “By combining the security, scalability and resiliency of IBM Power and IBM Cloud with the transformation capabilities of SAP Cloud ERP Private, we are committed to helping clients move forward with confidence on their modernization journeys.”

IBM is a full lifecycle strategic partner of SAP, providing end-to-end consulting and technology solutions for SAP customers including hybrid cloud, automation and agentic AI. IBM and SAP recently announced progress across AI and agentic capabilities to help accelerate enterprise transformation, including an expanded collaboration through the Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability standard to perform complex multi-agent services for clients. IBM Consulting Advantage can now manage Joule Agents, which work directly with IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate agents.

For more information about SAP Cloud ERP Private on IBM Power Virtual Server, visit: ibm.com/products/rise-with-sap.

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This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP’s 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F.
© 2026 SAP SE. All rights reserved.
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The utilities industry is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. The shift to renewables, smart metering, distributed energy resources, and expanding deregulation are reshaping the relationship between utility companies and their customers. Customer experience is no longer a back-office concern; it is a front-line, competitive differentiator.

The Advanced Success Plan version for SAP Customer Experience solutions is designed precisely for this moment. It offers utilities customers a structured, continuously guided approach to maximizing value from SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX) investments, from first adoption through to AI-enabled optimization.

A sector in motion: why customer experience has become strategic for utilities

Four converging forces are making customer experience a boardroom priority for utilities and increasing the demand for structured, expert-led adoption support.

• Energy transition and service complexity: Renewables, EV charging, solar feed-in tariffs, and demand response programs are adding new service dimensions. Customers expect their energy provider to manage this complexity seamlessly.
• Deregulation and customer switching: In liberalized energy markets, customers can, and do, switch providers. The cost of acquisition consistently exceeds the cost of retention. Superior service experience is a measurable retention lever.
• Smart metering and data volume: Smart meter rollouts generate billions of interval readings daily. This data can fuel proactive outreach and personalized billing, but only if the customer experience platform is correctly configured to act on it.
• Regulatory intensity: Billing accuracy mandates, complaint resolution timelines, and outage notification requirements are intensifying. The SAP CX portfolio can support compliance when features are correctly activated and configured.

SAP in utilities: a significant and growing market

Utilities are not a niche segment for SAP. Understanding the scale of the SAP utilities community frames why the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions matters for this industry in particular. SAP is trusted by hundreds of utilities customers globally and is among the leading technology providers in the sector by installed base, a position that continues to grow year-on-year. The investment in the relationship has been made. The question is whether customers are fully using what they have.

With the Advanced Success Plan, customers can turn the SAP Customer Experience portfolio into a driver of growth and innovation. They can gain the confidence to act decisively, supported by unlimited expert guidance and intelligent insights that help ensure every feature can deliver measurable business value.

The business case: customer retention over acquisition

For utilities operating in competitive markets, retaining customers has become as strategically important as acquiring new ones. Customers can switch suppliers in minutes via a digital platform, complaint escalation processes are visible on social media, and billing errors in a smart meter world are harder to excuse and faster to escalate.

The SAP CX portfolio can address these challenges across the full customer lifecycle. SAP Engagement Cloud enables targeted, segmented communications. SAP Service Cloud can centralize complaint management and agent interactions. SAP Sales Cloud helps manage accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities. SAP Commerce Cloud is the digital sales and self-service storefront layer and can handle how customers discover, compare, purchase, and manage energy products online. What the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions does is help to ensure these capabilities are not just purchased but adopted, optimized, and continuously improved.

How the Advanced Success Plan structures the adoption journey

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions helps organize the adoption journey across four distinct phases, each with a defined purpose and a set of targeted services:

1. Introducing innovation: Identify and prioritize the right innovations for your business. Services here include product guidance sessions covering areas such as utilities session and agent desktop, intelligent selling, campaigns and segmentation, and AI foundation and use case navigator.
2. Adopting innovation: Plan and prepare for structured adoption with minimal risk. Services include the AI process fit-gap analysis, key feature advisory, release guidance, success expert engagement, service planning, value management, innovation checkpoints, and adoption checkpoints.
3. Activation and optimization: Enable hands-on activation of AI and customer experience capabilities in your environment. Services include activation sessions across SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, and SAP Engagement Cloud; AI agent activation; embedded AI activation; Joule activation; and technical and functional assistance.
4. Success measurement and continuous improvement: Measure outcomes and sustain momentum through ongoing engagement. Services include a continuous engagement model, release guidance, success expert, value management, innovation checkpoints, and adoption checkpoints.

8 services available to utilities customers—and how each one helps

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions comprises eight distinct services. Each has a defined scope, a specific business need it addresses, and measurable benefits. For utilities customers, each service connects to a characteristic operational or strategic challenge.

Product guidance
Structured sessions introduce utilities teams to the capabilities most relevant to their context, from meter-read-driven billing notifications in SAP Service Cloud to segmented communications in SAP Engagement Cloud. The goal is to accelerate time-to-awareness, so teams know what exists before they have to find it.

Key feature advisory
This is curated, customer-specific guidance on which features to activate and in what sequence. For utilities, this means filtering a broad SAP CX road map down to the capabilities that matter for smart metering, complaints management, and outage communications then discarding what does not apply.

Release guidance
Every SAP CX quarterly release brings dozens of updates. Release guidance helps ensure utilities teams receive a focused brief on what is relevant to their industry context, not a generic list of all product changes, so adoption decisions can be faster and better informed.

Solution review
This is a structured review of the current solution configuration against best practice. For utilities, this commonly surfaces configuration gaps in complaint workflows, billing notification templates, or service agent desktop layouts that erode the customer experience over time if left unaddressed.

Transformation advisory
Strategic guidance connects SAP CX capabilities to the outcomes utilities care about most: cost-to-serve reduction, complaint resolution improvement, and regulatory compliance. Transformation advisory helps move the conversation from features to business impact.

Activation
This is hands-on, expert-assisted activation of specific capabilities in the customer’s live environment. For utilities, this includes activating Joule for service agents and enabling AI-driven case categorization in SAP Service Cloud. Many autonomous agents or assistants announced at SAP Sapphire, once available, can be activated to help guide service agents to process cases.

Technical assistance
Direct technical support across all phases of the engagement covers integration architecture, performance guidance, load testing guidance for mass billing cycles, and resolution of complex system behavior. This service is especially critical for utilities given the high-volume, time-sensitive nature of meter-read processing and month-end billing runs.

Functional assistance
This comprises business process and functional configuration support throughout the engagement. Utilities-specific coverage includes complaint handling workflows, outage notification sequences, and the configuration of billing determinant displays in the service agent desktop, helping to ensure what is built serves the way utilities actually operate.

A practitioner’s perspective

Working directly with utilities customers shows first-hand how the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions can drive meaningful business value, especially for organizations without deep technical or functional SAP CX expertise in-house. Utility companies face a specific set of challenges: complex billing architectures, regulatory requirements, and high customer expectations for responsive service. The right services delivered at the right moment can be genuinely transformational. Four patterns stand out consistently:

1. Bridging the knowledge gap for business users: Unlike system integrators or technical consultants, many utility business teams may not fully grasp the functional nuances required to maximize their SAP investment. Value-driven customer success manager engagement becomes critical here by translating technical possibilities into business outcomes, advising on feature adoption, and ensuring cross-team alignment across operations, IT, and customer management. The customer success manager acts as connective tissue between what SAP CX can do and what the business needs to achieve.
2. Go-live checks are the foundation for seamless launches: Utilities cannot rely on generic go-live checklists. Are meter reads flowing end-to-end? Are billing determinants and rate structures properly mapped? Are customer service orders integrated with billing and meter management systems? Comprehensive go-live checks built for the utilities context eliminate the guesswork, giving teams confidence that key processes are functioning correctly from day one, not discovered to be broken three months into the first billing cycle.
3. Road map guidance enabling better design decisions: Each SAP CX release brings dozens of new features, but only subsets are relevant for a given customer in a given market. Regular, curated road map guidance helps utilities focus on the features and design decisions that will most efficiently drive their specific outcomes, whether that is improving customer satisfaction, streamlining operations, or enriching digital self-service. This targeted approach prevents costly missteps and empowers business stakeholders to make confident decisions without requiring deep product expertise of their own.
4. Early-phase support building for reliability and performance: The early project phase is often when performance issues and integration risks are best addressed, but it is also where internal teams feel least certain. Proactive support that includes performance reviews spanning interconnected billing and service systems, high-level architecture guidance, and utilities-specific load testing helps ensure reliable operation under real-world peak conditions. Utilities processing millions of daily meter reads, running mass billing cycles at month-end, and handling seasonal demand spikes need to know their system will hold before the peak arrives, not after it has passed.

What stronger SAP CX adoption looks like in practice

When utilities customers engage with the full Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer experience solutions at the right moments, the outcomes can be concrete and measurable:

• Adoption confidence: Teams understand the SAP CX capabilities that matter for their industry and know how to use them. Adoption is driven by guided enablement, not trial and error.
• Configuration quality: Solution reviews and functional assistance can ensure complaint workflows, billing notifications, and service processes are correctly configured, reducing workarounds and support volume.
• Release relevance: Every quarterly SAP CX update is assessed for utilities relevance. Teams receive a focused brief on what to adopt, not a generic list of all product changes.
• AI activation at pace: Joule, embedded AI agents, and SAP Engagement Cloud intelligence features are activated with expert assistance, helping to move from available-in-catalogue to live-in-production for utilities use cases.
• Integration reliability: Standard integrations between SAP Service Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Utilities are correctly configured, giving agents real-time access to meter history, billing data, and service orders.
• Transformation clarity: Transformation advisory connects the SAP CX road map to the outcomes utilities care about most: cost-to-serve reduction, complaint resolution improvement, and regulatory compliance.

A service portfolio built for the complexity of utilities

The SAP investment in the utilities sector is substantial and well-established. Utilities organizations around the world have already deployed the SAP CX portfolio and are running their customer operations on it. The question is not whether they have access to world-class customer experience capabilities, but whether they are fully using what they have.

The eight services described above, combined with customer success manager-led perspectives on go-live quality, road map relevance, and performance assurance, represent a comprehensive framework for utilities organizations to realize the full potential of their SAP CX investment.

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions is not a generic offering. When applied with industry focus and customer success manager expertise, it becomes a strategic asset, one that helps utilities deliver on the promise of a superior customer experience in an increasingly competitive, regulated, and technically complex market.

Rajeev Ranjan is product manager for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.
Tara Tracey is global product owner for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Nokia, a global leader in connectivity for the AI era, has signed a new multi-year agreement with SAP to help accelerate its enterprise transformation using RISE with SAP Methodology, with its SAP S/4HANA software environment hosted on Microsoft Azure.

The agreement, concluded at the end of 2025, marks a significant step in migrating Nokia’s SAP landscape to the RISE with SAP journey. By adopting RISE with SAP Methodology, Nokia will follow a structured, end-to-end approach to migrating its ERP landscape covering processes, data, applications and operating models while gaining continuous access to innovation and embedded AI capabilities delivered through SAP’s cloud ERP portfolio.

Nokia has selected Microsoft Azure as the cloud platform underpinning the transformation, providing the global scale, security and performance required to support the company’s most business-critical enterprise workloads. “Nokia’s decision reflects a clear commitment to business-led transformation,” said Manos Raptopoulos, Global President Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East and Africa and Member of the Extended Board, SAP SE. “RISE with SAP Methodology provides Nokia with a structured road map, integrated toolchain and continuous access to innovation. It enables the company to modernize its ERP landscape while keeping a clean core and building a strong foundation for enterprise AI.”

A Structured Approach to ERP Transformation

RISE with SAP is designed as a comprehensive business transformation framework rather than a point solution. It combines a standardized transformation methodology, integrated tools and expert guidance to help organizations move from legacy ERP environments to RISE with SAP.

SAP will operate and manage the SAP S/4HANA software environment in the cloud, allowing Nokia to shift focus from infrastructure management to business outcomes. The approach supports process standardization, operational simplification and ongoing innovation, rather than a one-time system migration.

Nokia has been on a business and technical transformation journey with its next-generation SAP S/4HANA software environment, covering finance and key logistics capabilities, supported by SAP solutions and applications. These include SAP S/4HANA for central finance, SAP Master Data Governance, SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP Global Trade Services and SAP S/4HANA Cloud for advanced ATP. AI-enabled functionality embedded in SAP’s cloud applications will be progressively adopted as part of the journey.

“This agreement builds on our existing work with SAP and Microsoft and supports Nokia’s ambition to secure how we run our core business operations,” said Marek Očkay, VP, Global Head of IT Procurement & Vendor Management, Nokia. “By applying RISE with SAP Methodology on Microsoft Azure, we are strengthening a structured and future ready path for business growth — one that simplifies our ERP landscape, enables continuous innovation and strengthens our commitment for AI driven processes.”

Microsoft Azure as the Cloud Foundation

Microsoft Azure will serve as the cloud foundation for Nokia’s RISE with SAP journey, aligning with Nokia’s broader cloud and data strategy. Nokia already operates parts of its SAP landscape on Azure, and consolidating workloads on a single hyperscale platform is expected to deliver benefits in performance, security latency and operational resilience.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will collaborate closely with SAP and Nokia throughout the transformation, supporting migration activities and ongoing optimization.

“This collaboration demonstrates how cloud platforms, enterprise applications and AI can come together to support complex, global business transformations,” said Joacim Damgard, CVP, Europe North Microsoft. “By running SAP S/4HANA on Azure within the RISE with SAP journey, Nokia is creating a scalable and secure foundation for continuous innovation.”

Building on a Longstanding SAP Relationship

Nokia has been an SAP customer for decades. In recent years, the company has been consolidating multiple ERP systems into a unified SAP S/4HANA software landscape as part of its next-generation ERP program.

The move to RISE with SAP helps secure that journey, providing a structured methodology to help accelerate transformation, reduce complexity and unlock cloud native capabilities.

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Do your workforce insights drive decisions or sit in dashboards? OMV uses the People Intelligence solution in SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) to spot workforce composition patterns and move talent where it’s needed. Looking ahead, OMV plans to expand into workforce planning and learning analytics, bringing people investments closer to measurable business outcomes.

OMV is a multinational oil, gas, and chemical company headquartered in Vienna, Austria. With operations spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, New Zealand, and Norway, OMV is a truly global enterprise.

Like much of the energy sector, OMV is navigating a significant strategic pivot. The company is investing heavily in sustainability initiatives: transforming plastic waste back into oil, building one of Europe’s largest waste-sorting facilities to produce feedstock for refineries, and recycling plastic cups collected from aircrafts into sustainable kerosene. This shift in the business model has triggered a corresponding transformation inside the business—and nowhere more so than in HR.

OMV’s People and Culture (P&C) function launched a strategic program to place people at the center of the company’s transformation. The ambition was clear: become a global HR center of excellence, increase service quality, standardize and harmonize processes, and move decisively towards digitization, automation, and self-service.

The challenge: fragmented data and a manual reporting cycle

Before SAP BDC entered the picture, OMV’s HR data landscape was fragmented across a patchwork of systems that were never designed to work together for workforce reporting and analytics. Employee data lived in two on-premise SAP HCM systems and SAP SuccessFactors HCM, alongside Microsoft Excel, SharePoint, and a system originally built for financial consolidation that P&C used for headcount reporting and planning.

The day-to-day consequences were significant. When a business unit head or department manager wanted a workforce KPI—headcount figures, turnover rates, or anything beyond a basic report available in the system—they would raise a request with their HR business partner. From there, the HR business partner would spend considerable time navigating multiple systems, manually pulling data, compiling it into spreadsheets, and formatting it into a presentation before handing it back to the manager. It was time-consuming, error-prone, and consumed HR capacity that should have been spent on strategic work. Managers had no direct, self-service access to their own workforce data.

Choosing SAP Business Data Cloud and People Intelligence

“Normally, our strategy is not to be the first with a new solution. With SAP BDC it was different,” Bernhard Graser, head of SAP Finance, HR, and Reporting at OMV, said. “We saw the potential immediately and wanted to stop the outbound migration of our HR and SAP data and keep it firmly in the SAP ecosystem.”

The timing was fortuitous. OMV had already completed a substantial SAP SuccessFactors HCM implementation, having deployed SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, SAP SuccessFactors Learning, and SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development and going live in 2023 with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Compensation, and SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. With all core employee data now sitting in a cloud-based SaaS system, the foundation for SAP BDC connectivity was already in place.

OMV’s implementation of SAP BDC and People Intelligence

OMV structured its SAP BDC journey in three steps.

The first step—turning People Intelligence live—was connecting SAP SuccessFactors HCM to SAP BDC. This was not entirely without friction: OMV discovered that its on-premise HCM systems sat on a different Identity Authentication service than SAP SuccessFactors HCM, which required alignment before integration could proceed.

A more substantive challenge was data governance. As an Austrian company with a Works Council, it was not possible for OMV to simply push all HR data into SAP BDC. The team implemented data masking, configured Read Access Logging, and established permission controls that mirror SAP SuccessFactors HCM exactly, meaning a user can only see data in SAP BDC that they are already authorized to view in SAP SuccessFactors HCM. This level of governance was a prerequisite before any business users could interact with the system.

The second step, currently in progress, involves migrating both HCM systems to SAP S/4HANA. Once complete, SAP S/4HANA will connect directly to SAP BDC, enabling a fully unified data feed from both SAP SuccessFactors HCM and SAP S/4HANA into a single platform.

The third step, planned for the near future, is the retirement of the legacy reporting stack entirely, eliminating the spreadsheets and replacing the current workaround in the financial consolidation system with SAP BDC as the single reporting and planning environment for HR.

SAP BDC’s architecture played a key role in the decision. SAP-managed data products—pre-built data models maintained and updated by SAP—were particularly attractive, especially because OMV had kept its SAP SuccessFactors HCM configuration close to standard. That near-standard posture meant a larger share of OMV’s HR data could be served through SAP-managed products, reducing the internal maintenance burden. When something changes in a source system or a data definition, it is SAP’s responsibility to update the model, not OMV’s.

Current and future use cases

After evaluating the intelligent content available in People Intelligence, OMV decided to start with workforce composition insights, now live and providing out-of-the-box dashboards on headcount, workforce structure, and composition, fully configurable and filterable by business users.

With the foundation in place, OMV’s P&C team has been actively collecting ideas for what to build next on SAP BDC. On the operational side, the team wants to track accident-related data as a workforce KPI, monitor open positions across the business, and measure time-to-hire. Diversity is another priority—data that currently sits fragmented across systems. Through its participation in SAP’s forward deployed engineering program, OMV is co-building use cases around learning and certification compliance—a business-critical need in a refinery environment where workers must hold current safety certifications to enter operational sites—as well as skills and headcount. Looking further ahead, OMV intends to move into machine learning and predictive modelling, using the SAP Databricks capability in SAP Business Data Cloud to forecast workforce demand and identify gaps in skills and FTEs before they materialize.

The bottom line

The direction is clear: a single source of truth for HR data, self-service access for every manager and business unit head, and a platform capable of growing from descriptive reporting today into predictive workforce intelligence tomorrow. As Graser encouraged his audience at the end of his session at SAP Sapphire Madrid: “We see great potential in SAP BDC—not only in HR, but also in finance. You should try it.”

Learn more about People Intelligence here.