SAP announced that it is sunsetting mainstream maintenance for the ERP Central Component (ECC) as of 2027. Smart organizations are getting ahead of that deadline, prioritizing business-critical applications like SAP on their digital transformation roadmap. The pace of change has accelerated, largely due to the new market conditions brought by the pandemic. Hence, companies can no longer afford to wait to invest in cloud and digital infrastructure.
While determining digital transformation priorities, it’s important to consider the impact. It may be tempting to focus your cloud exploration on greenfield applications, but the companies will miss out on the full spectrum of cloud benefits if they ignore the technology underpinning the core business services. SAP is tied to 70% of core workloads in the enterprise and should not be overlooked.
By transforming applications like SAP, companies can meet the modern business expectations and market demands by:
- Capturing more data and transforming it into insights
- Delivering a more secure environment
- Increasing speed, scalability, performance, and usability
- Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO)
For example, at HCLTech, we helped a media and entertainment conglomerate modernize SAP and reduce costs by 35%. The company produces television networks, movies, and theme parks around the world. They realized they needed the flexibility and scale provided by the cloud infrastructure and were ready to move the SAP Solution Manager to the cloud.
Based on our deep expertise, we architected a framework to seamlessly migrate the company’s SAP application to a new cloud infrastructure stack, optimized for reliability, security, performance, and cost. The team also delivered an end-to-end service layer streamlining the company’s multi-vendor workflow, thereby saving time and money.
Without intervention, legacy systems become more complex over time, accumulating technical debt that prevents companies from enabling new services, such as automation, AI/ML, and analytics – effectively stifling innovation. It can also have a detrimental impact on talent attraction and recruiting. The shortage of tech talent is not new, but competition has increased more in light of the pandemic and remote work. Engineers are less willing to work on outdated systems. Investing in modern technology platforms is an essential component in your recruiting pipeline.
According to SAP, upgrades to S4/HANA have increased by 20% this year compared to the year before. Now is the time to engage business leaders on the value of SAP application modernization. Get ahead of the curve and competition by choosing the right path to cloud for your SAP modernization journey.
