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SAP SE is betting its future on cloud computing and its in-memory HANA platform, but many customers still can’t find the business case to validate the purchase, according to a survey from the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group. It’s a reminder that while there’s lots of talk about the possibilities of Big Data, the technological transition – especially for large companies – won’t happen overnight.

Of 377 respondents asked whether they had purchased a HANA product, just 40% said they had, while 55% hadn’t and 5% didn’t know. Three quarters of the customers who hadn’t purchased a HANA product said they couldn’t identify a business case that justifies the cost. Other reasons for not buying: skillset, roadmap and upgrade issues.

HANA is SAP’s flagship product, a database that allows customers to store information in live memory rather than on disc-based storage devices, and to analyze it without having to perform time-consuming intermediate operations.

The results underscore the challenge companies face as they figure out what role, if any, HANA and other new technologies will play in their IT strategies. CIOs are developing or refining those strategies at a time when IT spending power is fanning out across business units, and technology assets aren’t solely a back-office responsibility. Making a business case for big upgrades and finding the right solution “is not a linear equation anymore,” said Geoff Scott, CEO of the Americas SAP user group that conducted the survey.

Lower adoption may be due, at least in part, to the fact that some firms aren’t ready or able to accommodate the capabilities of the new platform, he said. “They may have the speed, but may not be in a position where business processes have caught up.” For large ERP projects especially, “adoption’s a little bit slower, and requires more finesse on the business side.”  CIO Journal has noted that bringing ERP into the cloud won’t be a particularly quick transition, especially for large customers.

Respondents who had implemented HANA said it was used to save money or optimize some processes. Almost 35% said it helped optimize costs, while 25% said it enabled innovation for the CFO or finance division. Among respondents who bought a HANA product, 65% said they started with Business Warehouse, a data warehouse tool.

The results suggest that the shift to cloud and in-memory computing will be a gradual one for most customers, which could hamper growth prospects for companies like SAP and competitor Oracle Corp. The larger companies are also working to fend off more nimble startups, many of which offer best-of-breed solutions for a specific part of a business, instead of a full end-to-end solution.

What could be holding HANA adoption back, the survey suggests, is that SAP won’t make customers move to it, at least not in the near term. SAP has said in the past that it will continue to support customers on their existing environments, whether on-premise or in the cloud.

Steve Lucas, president of SAP Platform Solutions, said, in a written statement from an SAP spokesperson, that the company has programs in place to address customer needs, and that it will continue to work with them to help unlock HANA’s benefits. “SAP has always been customer-centric in our approach to formulating our product and customer adoption strategies, and the SAP HANA product and solution line is no different.”