SAP: the pool is weighted toward the phase that ends

Data migration is the largest named skill in the SAP pool: 27.4% of 7,922 professionals across the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, 2,169 people. Security is the thinnest at 11.0%.

That ordering is not an accident of sampling. Migration is the workstream with a date on it, visible on every programme plan, and the skill a consultant can name after one cutover. Security is the workstream that runs after go-live and never finishes, and it is the line that gets cut at business-case stage when the number needs to come down.

The regional market has, in effect, declared its skills around go-live events. A rollout can therefore staff its migration workstream from the pool. It will struggle to staff its security workstream from the same pool, and the shortfall arrives at the point in the programme where there is least room to absorb it.

Migration is highest in the UAE at 32.1%, against 27.5% in the UK. Integration runs 4.3 percentage points higher in the Gulf than in the UK.

Integration running higher in the Gulf is consistent with a region that bought a great many platforms in a short period and then had to join them together. That is a coherent picture of a market's recent history rather than a curiosity, and it is useful: an integration-heavy programme has more to work with regionally than the headline pool size suggests.