Late 2024 I drove along the A2 motorway, past the SAP office in Den Bosch. A sizeable building, as you would expect from a market leader. But on the windows: “For rent: 2 floors could be yours.” It immediately reminded me of Odoo’s Sorry SAP campaign - the one where Odoo challenges the established order with a wink. I wrote a short piece about it at the time.
This is the update, and honestly it makes the story stronger: almost two years later, those floors on the Amerikastraat are still up for rent. I drove past again this summer: the sign is still there. Better yet, the building is now being marketed as a multi-tenant campus - “five high-quality office buildings”, units from 60 m². From “2 floors could be yours” to an entire shared building.
What an empty office does and does not prove
Let’s be fair, because we always are here: an empty floor does not prove SAP makes bad software. Offices are shrinking everywhere because of remote work, and with hundreds of thousands of business customers SAP is still the undisputed market leader. Odoo sat at around 120,000 business customers at the end of 2024 - a runner-up, not an heir to the throne.
But the direction is unmistakable. We see it daily in our own pipeline: companies that ten years ago automatically ended up with the big three now include Odoo in the comparison by default. Not because it is trendy, but for three sober reasons: the costs are in proportion to the use, changes do not require an army of consultants, and everything sits in one system - from webshop to accounting.
The S/4HANA pressure makes it current
What has been added since my drive along the A2: the pressure on SAP customers to migrate to S/4HANA gets more concrete every year. And a forced migration is exactly the moment companies start looking more broadly - if you have to re-implement anyway, why not compare properly? We have lined up the S/4HANA alternatives honestly, including the cases where staying with SAP is the best choice.
For anyone seriously considering the switch: this is what a SAP-to-Odoo migration looks like in practice, and the SAP cost-leak scan calculates the cost difference for your situation in a few minutes.
The floor goes to Odoo
“The floor goes to Odoo” was a pun about a window poster in 2024. Today it is simply a description of how our conversations go: the question is rarely “is Odoo serious enough?” any more, but “why are we still paying this much for what we do not use?”.
So yes, sorry SAP. The floors are still there. And the companies that could have occupied them increasingly choose an entirely new system instead.