Saphila: Africans reshape disruption

In Africa, individuals and organisations are turning disruption into momentum, positioning their countries as global testbeds for innovation and resilience.

“When we talk about the future, we have to acknowledge the fact that we live in uncertain times,” said Stefan Steinle, SAP EVP for customer support and cloud lifecycle management, during a keynote at the Saphila 2025 conference in Sun City.

“This is the new normal that we are experiencing. But let me say something that is encouraging: specifically here in South Africa, specifically here in Africa, I don’t think there’s a better place in the world that has shown how challenges can be translated into real opportunities.”

Saphila is a biennial conference for the SAP user group community, hosted by the African SAP User Group (AFSUG) in partnership with global enterprise software giant SAP.

He cited M-Pesa as an example of Africa’s ability to drive large-scale innovation with global impact. Originally launched in Kenya by Vodafone and Safaricom, the platform was designed to allow users to store, send, and receive money using mobile phones – even without access to a formal bank account.

M-Pesa became a global benchmark for mobile money solutions, widely adopted due to its simple interface, broad accessibility, and a vast agent network that facilitates cash-in and cash-out transactions. It contributed to expanding financial inclusion by allowing users in developing regions to access services like remittances, bill payments, and micro-loans.

Its success, however, has varied by market. In South Africa, Vodacom discontinued the service in June 2016 after it struggled to gain critical mass. Factors like higher levels of financial inclusion, a distinct regulatory environment, and strong competition from traditional banks limited its uptake.

The experience underscores that transformative innovations must adapt to specific local conditions. It is a reminder that success in one part of the continent doesn’t always translate directly to another. It also highlights the opportunity for African innovation to be rooted in local realities, with solutions designed for the specific needs of each market rather than relying on one-size-fits-all models.

Steinle said the Africa’s digital transformation volume is expected to double from today’s $26-billion to up to $55-billion by 2030. He said this projected growth reflects the region’s readiness to move beyond short-term volatility and build long-term business value.

“This is encouragement that we are at the right place to turn uncertainties, disruption and challenges into opportunities and into good business outcome. This is not only required from a geopolitical and macro economical perspective, but also because of the new technologies that have evolved.”

Many organisations today are still working with heavily customised systems and a mix of deployment models, combining best-of-breed solutions with elements of both cloud and on-premise infrastructure. In many cases, Steinle said, they also have isolated AI implementations.

He said the challenge is not just managing this complexity but integrating these disparate systems and making sense of the disconnected data across them to deliver meaningful business outcomes.

SAP offers a set of tools to support this transformation. For existing customers, Rise with SAP enables a shift to S/4HANA while providing access to the full suite of SAP’s software as a service (SaaS) products, available in both private and public cloud options. For new customers, Grow with SAP offers a streamlined public cloud SaaS portfolio.

Steinle said that these offerings are about more than technology or products. They are also about enabling end-to-end transformation.

SAP’s product strategy is rooted in the belief that end-to-end business processes run more effectively on a fully integrated, cloud-based suite of applications. Rather than assembling a patchwork of best-of-breed solutions, which might offer marginally better features in specific areas, SAP advocates for a unified system that avoids the long-term complexity of integration and data management.

He said that, while best-of-breed tools may provide short-term benefits, they often require significant time and resources to connect, harmonise, and extract meaningful data.

According to SAP, IT departments currently spend around 80% of their time just maintaining existing systems, ensuring compliance, managing integrations, and aligning data structures. It leaves little time to deliver strategic value to business stakeholders. This, he said, is why SAP recently launched Business Data Cloud: to help organisations unify fragmented data landscapes, simplify integration, and focus more on value creation.

SAP positions Business Data Cloud to help organisations manage complexity and make better use of their data in an environment increasingly shaped by AI. The platform is intended to provide reliable, integrated data for use in AI models, offering a structured base for AI initiatives.

For companies in Africa, for example, it can assist in responding to growing digital demands by making operational data more usable for analytics, customer engagement, and long-term business planning.

*Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and writer for Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Bluesky at @jas2bann.