What 2025 actually brought SAP Business One users
Looking back across 2025, three things genuinely moved for SAP Business One businesses, and they're worth separating from the noise because each one changed who gets hired in the channel.
Cloud stopped being a conversation. New B1 deployments defaulted to cloud or hosted setups, the web client matured to the point where partners demo it first, and the remaining on-premise estate became exactly that — an estate, maintained rather than grown. For customers this mostly meant less infrastructure to own. For the channel it meant consultants who could talk hosting, security and subscription licensing became more useful than ones who could only talk modules.
HANA became the assumption. The SQL-to-HANA migration wave carried straight through the year, and it remains the single busiest project type on our SAP Business One desk. Consultants with delivered HANA migrations kept earning their 12–18% premium over SQL-only peers, a gap that's held long enough that we now treat it as structural — the current bands are in our B1 salary guide.
And the AI features arrived in useful, unglamorous forms: better forecasting, smarter matching, assistants that answer the routine questions. Nothing that replaced a consultant; plenty that changed what customers ask consultants to set up.
What it means for 2026 planning
If you run B1: the platform is not standing still, and neither is SAP's direction of travel — cloud, HANA, AI-assisted everything. The businesses getting the most from it are the ones with a named platform owner, whether that's an in-house administrator or a genuinely engaged partner. If you have neither, that's the gap to fix first.
If you work in the ecosystem: the skills that appreciated in 2025 — HANA, integration, cloud deployment — are the same ones we expect to appreciate through 2026, because the migration backlog hasn't cleared and the partner channel is still short-handed. We wrote about that shortage in detail here, and the salary checker will tell you what your current mix is worth.
Either way, if B1 is your platform or your career, it's our home market — we're easy to find.