How the move to the cloud succeeds

Well before the cloud era, some of our avant-garde customers were already looking at workflow-based document flows. With how such requirements could be designed digitally and how an electronic signature could work. The goal was to digitize the analog signature folder served with coffee and pen. At the time, we were able to help with a suitable application. The cloud has changed things quite a bit. The processes are largely similar, but users have developed new needs in terms of user interfaces that can be used on the move, stricter legal frameworks have been added, the fountain pen has been replaced by the certificate, smartphone or signpad, and IT security requirements have increased.

Current market forecasts show where the journey is heading: While the on-premises business for SAP will grow by just two percent over the next five years, according to analysts, they predict a six-fold (!) increase in the market for hybrid or cloud-based solutions. No wonder, then, that the path for classic add-on developments leads directly to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). 

In order to convince even sworn on-premises users, SAP launched a charm offensive almost a year ago under the title Rise with SAP. "A company no longer has to move to the cloud all at once, but can start with just human resources, for example, and in the next step move finance to the cloud, for example"At the time, SAP CEO Christian Klein allayed fears of overly radical changes. The success seems to prove him right - in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, sales with S/4 Hana Cloud increased by 65 percent, according to SAP primarily driven by Rise. The demand is not surprising, since a model is also offered here that includes basic BTP licensing and enables a smooth transition via hybrid intermediate solutions.

But it is not just the users who are challenged to transform themselves in the direction of the cloud - we SAP partners are too. Be it in consulting or in the best-practice solutions we offer. This brings us full circle to the topic of the digital signature folder mentioned at the beginning. After customer inquiries as to whether our application was also BTP-capable and whether we would continue to offer an on-premises connection for it - typical requirements for this come from a Microsoft AD integration or the use of on-prem ERP users, for example - we set to work. And after intensive work on topics like CAP, Node.js, CDS, MTA, Hybrid Dev, Hana, PostgreSQL, IAS, SAP Fiori Launchpad, today we proudly look at our first SAP cloud application SnapWare - the BTP signature folder. 

The road leads to the cloud

Some insights from this re-engineering that I consider essential: First, the path from the on-premises world to the cloud world involves a very steep learning curve. It takes time, so take time out of your day-to-day business to do it. Secondly, you should think early enough about how you want to transform your processes to the cloud and consider possible hybrid interim solutions. Thirdly, you should use features of the cloud architecture that cannot be implemented on-premises with the same value (scalability, security, multi-tenant apps, Fiori and modern software development methods). And fourth, not everything in the cloud has the maturity you're used to, and some of the newer concepts are disappearing as fast as they came. So my advice as an old R/2 freestyle developer: Approach the new world in small steps - but in time! Because on-prem knows only one direction: to the cloud.