The crux of the matter

The announcement of the maintenance extension was necessary because - before the Covid- 19 pandemic began - only just over ten percent of SAP customers had completed the conversion to S/4 Hana. This is likely to have changed little since then, especially since fewer new projects are being started in the meantime. In any case, this is an exciting time to see where many SAP customers are headed.

A changeover is rarely a 1:1 conversion of existing processes to S/4. Provided the necessary internal and external resources are available, this change is also a good opportunity to implement other changes in parallel: This can include the implementation of further business processes on S/4 that have not yet been carried out digitally.

This is the "easiest" way, which keeps implementation costs and times small for the time being. Another option is to merge other already digital business processes from other solutions onto S/4. An interesting option, especially if the company has legacy solutions that are difficult and expensive to maintain.

In a "best of breed" approach, on the other hand, S/4 is implemented as the core and further functionalities are outsourced from the existing SAP system. This is suitable, for example, for CRM, Human Resources, Supply Chain Management or IoT.

The transition to the cloud is on the agenda of many companies. This also raises the question of whether the new solution should (continue to) be used as an on-premises solution or as a private cloud, or whether a modern hybrid cloud approach should be chosen. Even if a "born in the cloud" approach is not feasible at SAP, since the applications come from the on-premises area, more and more companies are driving a "cloud first" strategy.

However, SAP itself provides little assistance here: On the one hand, there are hyperscalers such as AWS, IBM, MS Azure or Google, which have offers for SAP customers with different strategies. On the other hand, SAP itself acts as a provider with the SAP Cloud. This is a classic conflict, as SAP operates a customized solution itself in competition with its partners.

However, this does not play a major role outside the SAP ecosystem. Customers can be helped here by a hybrid cloud approach in which components can be transferred at any time to the cloud of their choice and mixed between various clouds and bare metal.

Application management (a combination of the development and support of applications over their entire life cycle) is still an important option for many customers. Especially for customers who have already used this in SAP ECC and R/3. In addition to the decision for operation and service, this is also a decision for deployment. This is where providers who offer additional layers for containerization and microservices or best practices tailored to SAP come into their own.

Once they have achieved their goal in one way or another, customers then have the ideal basis with S/4 to drive their digital transformation forward. The SAP core system either already brings the necessary technologies such as AI or Big Data tools, or third-party solutions such as IoT, supply chain solutions, CRM and many others can be easily connected.

Thus - depending on the operator model - the basis is S/4 Hana. Since S/4 demands and promotes a uniform data model, it thus supports interoperability between the various customer solutions, including different SAP systems. In sum, this results in overall solutions that appear from the outside to be from a single mold, even if it is not visible - as with the poodle - what the core is (the dog) and what the third-party systems are (the hairdo).