The slow pace of migration to SAP S/4HANA is confusing. Only 14% of SAP users are live now. However, support for SAP Business Suite will end in 2027, and any options to pay extra for extended maintenance will expire in 2030. Given the complexity of the migration, these are tight deadlines.
Add in skills shortages and it’s clear that waiting longer to make decisions is a very high-risk strategy, writes Rohan de Souza, Head of SAP Business, European Platform Business at Fujitsu.
The skepticism of SAP’s decision makers suggests that the potential benefits offered from the move are not yet sufficiently clear. Fujitsu’s main idea here is that application modernization should add something more. Creating new business value – we can also call it business innovation – requires more. If all you do is modernize, it equates to maintenance.
This article covers two examples of strategic benefits to be gained from migrating S/4HANA to create new business value – composable ERP and cloud migration/hybrid IT. And I’ll be looking at the new services now available from Fujitsu to get those benefits reliably and quickly.
Composable ERP
A strategic benefit from the move is the ability to connect your business to be more adaptable and do new things. Analyst company Gartner recognizes that many manufacturers now have multiple systems of record in the game – SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, AWS, and Microsoft. It coined the term “Composable ERP” to describe and promote this trend. Composable ERP is an approach where we use the right components to build value, mixing and matching between vendors. In other words, ERP is no longer a monolithic thing – as in “I’m all SAP” or “We’re an Oracle shop”.
You get fully connected, real-time data to provide a complete view of your business across upstream and downstream supply chains. The S/4HANA migration offers the perfect time for assessing and addressing how the data infrastructure can be modernized to create this type of “Control Tower” environment.
Cloud migration and hybrid cloud
One factor that makes S/4HANA even more connected is that it is the first version of ERP that is truly cloud-native. This feature unlocks all the benefits of cloud migration and the ultimate flexibility of SAP workload placement. Therefore, it is important that your migration to S/4HANA enables your organization to achieve all the strategic benefits of hybrid cloud environments.
However, workloads in hybrid environments are incredibly complex. The workload demand can be in a wide range of environments, including multiple on-premise locations, with cloud partners such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform and their respective regional nodes. Optimizing your SAP infrastructure to operate successfully in these environments requires a high level of understanding about what is happening where and — just as importantly — what might be happening underneath the particular situation.
To help with this, Fujitsu now offers a new Hybrid Cloud Assessment Service for SAP Solutions that evaluates millions of possible placement options based on measured workloads. Fujitsu BestPlace provides a unique data-driven approach. It encodes the measured SAP IT as DNA and simulates a mini evolution using genetic algorithms. Following the principle of survival of the fittest, the process results in an optimal design for a hybrid infrastructure.
It’s an individualized approach that addresses the specific needs of each customer rather than a generic model that is unlikely to meet all the needs of all users. It measures SAP onsite operations for approximately four weeks, compares all the different placement options against the customer’s IT strategy and business priorities and provides a cost comparison for all of measured SAP instance workload in the cloud or on-premise. The algorithm was developed by an external university to ensure neutral results.
Value faster with rightsizing
An effective ERP should enable organizations to access quick insights, make quick decisions, and capture value from a change of direction as quickly as possible. However, common user complaints are “my SAP is too slow” and “SAP is reconnected”.
To address this, as well as optimizing workload placements, it is also important to assess infrastructure size, deployment, and maintenance. SAP performance and service level issues can have many roots and finding the optimal configuration is always very difficult. Therefore, a common approach to forcing a solution is brute force: buying and installing more infrastructure, regardless of whether it addresses the actual cause. That’s an expensive way of solving the problem.
Businesses migrating today can benefit from rightizing their SAP implementations. Unlike standard SAP tools, based on reference architectures, Fujitsu’s SystemInspection Service for SAP Solutions (SIS) uses real-life data from your landscape, creating data-driven decision support for any migration or hardware refresh. This evaluation and consultation package captures all these parameters, avoiding overspending later.
SIS provides clear recommendations for improving on-premise or cloud IT for SAP landscapes by identifying bottlenecks, performance anomalies, and realistic capacity requirements. By rightizing the new S/4HANA for on-premise, it narrows the gap between on-premise and cloud in terms of costs, as you don’t have to buy so much excess capacity that is often idle.
The simplicity of the infrastructure
Regarding infrastructure options, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA enables the full potential of SAP HANA’s in-memory computing. It is a pre-tested infrastructure solution, 100% SAP certified and designed for the SAP HANA in-memory architecture. It exploits the full capabilities of redundant memory without deployment and configuration risks and simplifies operation and maintenance with a single service partner for the entire solution stack.
Yes, Fujitsu can handle SAP
Fujitsu has a very strong partnership with SAP. We have approximately 8,000 customer installations worldwide. For example, at Fujitsu’s Technical Competence Demo Center in Walldorf, Germany – the home of SAP – customers can optimize their investment in SAP infrastructure based on actual use cases.
If you have — and intend to continue to have — SAP ERP, you need to lock in your migration partner within the next 12 months. Wait too long, and everyone will be chasing a limited pool of resources, losing control over the migration timetable, and resulting in higher prices.
Migration is a fantastic opportunity to create new business value. Fujitsu’s SystemInspection Service for SAP, and its Hybrid Cloud Assessments Service enable customers to fully understand their environments, then map their business goals and transformation plans to the optimal architectural and infrastructure solutions. What better way to experience this than by signing up for a Fujitsu CX Labs session.