SAP Services

The evaluation this category was waiting for has been out since March 2025: The Forrester Wave: SAP Services, Q1 2025. It published into a market whose defining event is a deadline, the end of SAP ECC mainstream maintenance, and the scorecard grades the firms hired to move enterprises to S/4HANA before the clock runs out.

The report that is already out: The Forrester Wave: SAP Services, Q1 2025

The Q1 2025 Wave was authored by senior analyst Akshara Naik Lopez, announced March 4, 2025, and scored thirteen service providers. It follows The SAP Services Landscape, Q3 2024, whose framing names the market's center of gravity: SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA cloud migrations taking center stage for most SAP clients.

The evaluation's criteria run the standard services Wave structure, current offering, strategy, and market presence, with the SAP-specific columns that decide these engagements: depth across the SAP product stack, global delivery strategy, and the ability to run industry-specific transformation programs at scale.

The clean-core concept is the edition's technical heart. The migration to S/4HANA is not a lift-and-shift, and the vendors that lead are the ones building composable, clean-core, multipillar architectures rather than re-implementing the old ERP monolith in the cloud.

The deadline deserves its precision, because it is the market's true product. SAP set the end of ECC mainstream maintenance for 2027, with extended options beyond, and the services market's near-term demand is locked in by that calendar rather than by customer appetite. Every enterprise on ECC must move, choose a partner, and execute on a schedule that is not fully under its control, and the scorecard grades the firms whose job is to make the forced march survivable.

The Leader and the global-scale argument

Capgemini took a Leader placement with the highest possible scores in nine criteria, including vision and global delivery strategy, and in six of seven SAP product criteria.

Forrester's fit verdict is the market's largest customer segment in one sentence: "a great fit for industry-specific large SAP transformation programs requiring global-scale deployment with a good balance of onshore and offshore resources, continuous improvement, and sustainability as focus areas."

The citation's technical content describes the modern delivery play: value management, continuous improvement, and the move toward composable, clean-core, multipillar S/4HANA architecture with an increased sustainability focus. The 2025 SAP services market is, in the scorecard's terms, a delivery-architecture competition as much as a consulting competition.

What the migration market is actually buying

The ECC-to-S/4HANA migration is the largest forced-march transformation in enterprise software, and the Wave grades the firms that run it. The Landscaper's framing deserves emphasis: the migration is "taking center stage for most SAP clients," which means the services market's near-term demand is locked in by a maintenance deadline rather than by appetite.

That lock-in shapes the scorecard. The criteria reward the vendors with the industrialized methods, the accelerators, the global delivery factories, and the industry templates, because the market's problem is not advising on S/4HANA, it is executing thousands of migrations before the deadline.

The thirteen-vendor field is the market's own supply picture: the global systems integrators with SAP practices at scale, the regional specialists, and the India-headquartered delivery giants, all competing for the same migration calendar. The field's composition matters as much as its tiers, because the buyer's shortlist is drawn from this roster, and the roster's shape, global scale versus regional depth, is the first procurement decision.

The other placements in the thirteen-vendor field have not surfaced publicly, and this article names what the record supports and nothing beyond it.

The European sibling scorecard

The market also runs a Europe-specific evaluation, The Forrester Wave: SAP Services In Europe, Q2 2025, published May 2025 and authored by Dario Maisto with Pascal Matzke and Akshara Naik Lopez, which is covered in its own article in this series.

The two editions' relationship is the market's structure: the global Wave grades scale and breadth, the Europe Wave grades sovereignty-adjacent concerns, delivery silos, tax-informed transformation, and the European-headquartered providers' home advantage. A European buyer runs both scorecards, and the global tier is only half the shortlist.

The honest limits of a global scorecard

One Leader placement and the field's size are publicly confirmed, and the rest of the tier table has not surfaced. The thin public record is the market's own habit: SAP services firms announce the wins that fit their sales motion, and most placements stay quiet.

The migration-deadline caveat is the bigger one. The scorecard grades capability against the S/4HANA wave as it stood in early 2025. The wave's shape, the remaining ECC estate, the migration pace, changes every quarter, and a buyer's own migration position matters more than any tier. The scorecard ranks the firms. The deadline ranks the buyer, and the two rankings meet only in the contract.

Three questions for the migration buyer

Where are you in the migration, and which capability does your position demand? The deadline-driven market rewards different vendors for greenfield, brownfield, and selective data transition approaches. Name your transition type before the tier, because the scorecard averages all three.

Is the proposed architecture clean-core or re-implemented monolith? The edition's technical thesis is composable, clean-core multipillar S/4HANA. Ask the vendor to draw the target architecture and count the customizations, because a monolith re-implemented in the cloud is the failure mode the scorecard is grading against.

Who runs the engagement, the global factory or the local team? The Leader's citation balances onshore and offshore. Ask for the named team, the delivery locations, and the escalation path, because the migration's risk lives in the handoffs.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

The adjacent shortlist item is SAP Services In Europe: each of this evaluation's three Leaders holds a claim no other firm in the field can make, and one of them centers on a genuinely European problem the global SAP services scorecard never has to score: tax-informed transformation.