Sapphire: from SAP R/2 to R/3
Sapphire: from SAP R/2 to R/3Plattner justified the worldwide redundancies at SAP with the need to get rid of legacy issues in order to bring new developments to market more quickly. SAP boss Bill McDermott and Plattner call it reorganization.
But Hasso Plattner emphasized in his Sapphire keynote and subsequent press conference that obviously the successful ERP concept (R/2, R/3 and ECC 6.0) of the past cannot be a basis for Hana, S/4, BW/4 and C/4 in the public cloud.
Plattner wants his CEO Bill McDermott to create a new SAP in the public cloud with short innovation cycles and continuous maintenance. What Plattner called for at Sapphire in Orlando is known in the SAP community as Greenfield:
The release changeover to Hana and S/4 takes place in a green way and without legacy issues. This makes it much easier to get the complex construct of Hana and S/4 up and running. And with the greenfield approach, you don't need the experienced employees from the past that Bill McDermott is currently throwing out the door worldwide.
The existing SAP customers who traveled to Orlando do not agree with this greenfield approach at all. Anyone who has successfully operated an SAP ERP system for many years has accumulated a very valuable treasure trove of data, which should of course also be available in a new S/4 system.
The experts also call the smooth transition from R/3 to S/4 Brownfield and you can take all important data with you. How? You can read all the details for a successful S/4 data conversion in the E-3 report on Data Migration Services (https://e3zine.com/special-algorithms-data-structures/) and in the Success Story about the global consumer goods manufacturer Henkel (https://e3zine.com/henkel-formula-decommissioning/).
So while Plattner and McDermott in Orlando definitely prefer the greenfield in the public cloud, the vast majority of existing SAP customers seem to choose the soft option of brownfield in their own data center. Wish and reality: While Plattner finds his home in the public cloud, Bill McDermott is much more realistic.
He recognized at the beginning of this year that his customers do not want to use the SAP public cloud. On the last day of Sapphire, he presented the "Embrace" program together with Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Just as existing SAP customers prefer SAP software, the majority of them choose one of the large hyperscalers as their infrastructure.
Even after Sapphire, SAP cloud platforms will remain reserved for a few special applications. In the future, the SAP ERP system will remain an island in its own data center or with hyperscalers, as Hasso Plattner made a clear statement on the integration idea during his keynote speech:
It is not difficult to build a bridge from SAP to Qualtrics using current SAP tools. In Plattner's opinion, this renders any further integration idea obsolete - this can also be called greenfield.
