Haste with cloud

Former SAP CEO Professor Henning Kagermann once urged his customers to switch to mySAP.com 2004 and then to SAP Business Suite 7, even though many users were still quite satisfied with SAP R/3 and had just completed the release upgrade to R/3 Enterprise.

Now SAP is pushing existing customers into the S/4 Cloud with Rise and Grow. It has to happen quickly: S/4 celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2025, regular maintenance for Business Suite 7 (SAP ECC 6.0) ends in 2027 and, for the time being, S/4 Hana is to receive support from SAP until 2040. Naturally, new customers have opted for S/4 in recent years, but many ERP systems of existing R/3 and ECC customers are still on previous versions.

The good news is that years of pressure and threats from SAP have led many existing customers to S/4 proof-of-concepts. Many SAP partners are also well aware of the pitfalls of an S/4 conversion and can offer it largely without risk. Theoretically, therefore, nothing stands in the way of a rapid release change to S/4 Hana.

The bad news: for many existing SAP customers, the S/4 release change is not the most urgent problem. Digitalization in general and the lack of ERP infrastructure concepts as well as global challenges in the respective organizational and operational structures need to be solved. ECC 6.0 is still sufficiently stable and running well, so once again the old IT adage applies: never change a running system.

SAP Business Suite (ERP/ECC 6.0) with AnyDB or Hana is sufficient for many projects and plans in the context of digitalization - the DSAG user association noted this fact many years ago, much to SAP's chagrin, and little has changed since then! On the contrary: the new challenges of digital transformation can be solved faster, better and more cost-effectively with external tools. AI applications are offered directly by SAP partners and existing SAP customers are better able to find AI innovations at start-ups. Most things can be easily integrated via SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) anyway.

The SAP community is in no hurry to move to an S/4 cloud. This is not a fundamental rejection of a cloud for SAP ERP, but rather a current criticism of the framework conditions! Haste is therefore the preferred recipe for Rise and Grow with SAP. The topics of hybrid, private or public cloud are preoccupying the SAP community and many of these concepts are justified, but SAP has also not yet done its homework in some areas.

A major challenge with Rise with SAP for existing customers is the license conditions, because not only is a cloud model calculated and purchased, but an on-prem model (usually ECC 6.0) must also be decommissioned. Here, existing SAP customers can hardly reach a reasonable compromise without legal support from experts. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to cloud exit. An EU regulation will soon come into force which states that cloud providers must provide their customers with fair offers and active support when exiting the cloud. Details are still lacking and SAP has so far remained silent on this EU law.

If an SAP user nevertheless opts for the Rise contract, then a game of chance begins: the successful release change is largely dependent on the customizing team that SAP itself provides. This means that there is currently a lot of light and shade for future S/4 users. There are highly motivated and well-trained SAP teams from SAP headquarters in Walldorf, but also less experienced teams from India. This means that the S/4 path to the cloud needs to be carefully considered, and it is still important to hurry. So, dear existing SAP customer, act with due haste, but don't rush things!