SAP Finds Strong Interest in Blockchain Despite Early Adoption Stage

If enterprise blockchain adoption were a baseball game, we'd be in the first inning, but the stands are packed.

After attending SAP's media and analyst event in San Francisco on September 4, the company’s latest survey of roughly 250 customers reveals that 92% see opportunity in blockchain and 84% are already engaged in related activities.

Yet only 3% have moved beyond pilots to production deployments. SAP’s senior vice president for products and innovations, Gil Perez, explained that those live deployments are still experimental “pilots.”

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These figures contrast sharply with a Gartner CIO survey released earlier this year, which found that only 1% of CIOs had any blockchain adoption and a mere 8% were in short‑term planning or active experimentation.

PwC’s recent study highlights trust as the biggest barrier to adoption. “Blockchain, by definition, should engender trust, yet concerns about reliability, speed, security, and scalability persist,” the report notes.

The survey identified supply chain and IoT as the most promising use cases, with 63% of respondents endorsing them. Legal and regulatory applications followed at 19%. When asked about future impact, 96% said regulatory and legal would have the biggest effect—an insight that highlights a gap between current use cases and anticipated impact.

SAP positions itself as a catalyst for enterprise blockchain adoption. Ninety‑one percent of surveyed customers reported that SAP’s involvement positively impacted their own adoption journey.

Customers are eager to create immutable transactions and link disparate data sets. Ram Jambunathan, senior vice president and managing director at SAP.iO, notes that blockchain could transform lending, especially by reducing information asymmetry in trade finance.

Michael Flannagan, senior vice president of SAP Leonardo and Analytics, observes that “if I asked ten customers about their production use case, I’d get seven different answers,” underscoring the diversity of applications.

Among the most mature enterprise blockchain use cases today, Perez cites compliance and regulatory use cases, as well as food and pharmaceutical supply chains, as leading the pack.