In the enterprise technology game, migrating an enterprise SAP® landscape is nobody’s idea of a good time. In fact, the process of uprooting and relocating business-critical SAP applications can be flat-out terrifying.
Today, many more IT organizations are getting a taste of this classic white-knuckle migration experience as companies begin moving their on-premise SAP environments to the Cloud. Many organizations, however, are learning how to hop off the roller coaster and opt for a simpler, easier, surprise-free SAP Cloud migration experience.
If that sounds like a direction, you’d like to take your company’s SAP Cloud migration, read on!
The Managecore team has done some really impactful work in the pursuit of this goal, but it’s important to understand the big picture: how our technology and services complement SAP’s migration and Cloud hosting support offerings; and how Managecore helps companies get value from their SAP Cloud migrations in unexpected and sometimes surprising ways. Today, we’ll shed some light on these very important questions.
The Balancing Act That Drives SAP’s Success: RISE with SAP
Let’s begin by looking at SAP’s key Cloud migration and managed hosted offering: RISE with SAP. In early 2021, the Managecore team was involved in some of the very first RISE with SAP deals, and today we’re just as supportive of SAP’s work in this area. RISE with SAP is clearly hitting the mark in terms of giving companies that critical extra measure of ROI potential, financial returns on licenses, help with maintenance costs and the overall confidence in the migration process itself. And by any measure, that’s a very good thing.
It’s important, however, to keep a couple of important points in mind when you think about how RISE with SAP, in particular for those SAP customers that are ready to begin your Cloud migration journey.
First, understand that RISE with SAP is shaped to deliver the greatest possible value to a very large and diverse segment of its customer base. That means striking the right balance between a number of different priorities—for example, focusing its hosting options on customers that are moving to the Cloud with new or existing SAP S/4HANA systems and helping them make the leap into the Cloud that much easier (via lift and shift), while still showing some love for customers running older Business Suite applications with some Cloud hosting capabilities.
Understanding this is critical when making your decision to leverage RISE with SAP as a way to minimize migration cost and risk. But this also means that RISE with SAP won’t be everything to everybody: it can’t support every corner of a vast and varied SAP technology ecosystem without diluting the things it does very well.
The High Cost of Falling Short on Due Diligence
At the end of the day, SAP does exactly what it should do in this situation: it discloses to customers exactly what RISE with SAP will and will not support. And it leaves the responsibility for due diligence with the customer, which is where it should be.
Unfortunately, many enterprises simply don’t have the IT bandwidth (or in some cases the right internal expertise) to parse RISE with SAP disclosures and documentation, and to ask the basic questions: How much of our current SAP environment can we migrate through RISE with SAP? What are our options for dealing with the remaining applications and who will manage these if they are not included in the RISE with SAP solution? What does all of this mean for scoping and scheduling our Cloud migration?
Finally, keep in mind that managing complexity isn’t just about the applications that RISE with SAP cannot support, but it’s also about understanding what the RISE with SAP options are and add-on capabilities that can elevate migration ROI for years to come. Two examples:
- SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) consumption credits give customers thousands of options for enhancing a RISE environment: from SAP S/4HANA integration (including over 2,000 prebuilt integrations) to database management to SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (SAP Intelligent RPA) and other analytics tools
- Access to a comprehensive set of services related to lifecycle management, analytics, support, and more addressing everything from employment assistance and legacy code maintenance, to supply chain process improvement, business scenario planning, and intelligent business design.
Here’s my point: Taking full advantage of the opportunities that RISE with SAP has to offer that include Cloud migration support requires the ability to make sense of a huge amount of information and to make a lot of very important choices—and to do it all in what may be an impossibly short amount of time. Throw in an already overstretched (and overstressed) IT team, and you’ve got a recipe for disappointment and frustration as SAP customers discover that they simply don’t have the required knowledge and experience to navigate the RISE with SAP due diligence process.
Making Sense of the ‘Unknown Unknowns’
Helping enterprises rise above these challenges is a big part of the Managecore value prop. More specifically, it’s why we created ManagecoreiQ+ on RISE with SAP: a seamless collaborative support offering that includes advisory services, SAP monitoring, SAP security services, and many other capabilities to complement a RISE with SAP solution running on a world-class Public Cloud Platform.
ManagecoreiQ+ on RISE with SAP begins to make a difference for our customers before the migration process even begins. Our advisory services shine a bright light on the process of assessing and purchasing RISE with SAP—helping customers formulate the right questions to ask their SAP account executive and walking them through the answers. We can turn the due diligence process from an exercise in uncertainty into a truly enlightening journey and help SAP customers spot and assess the “unknown unknowns” that can otherwise derail the RISE implementation process.
Elevate Your Approach to Implementing and Getting Value from RISE with SAP
Other elements of ManagecoreiQ+ on RISE with SAP work together to give customers full visibility into their SAP Cloud environment, additive technical capabilities, and the building blocks for a constructive ongoing dialogue with SAP sales, support, and product teams. Some elements, such as our Managecore Watchdog monitoring platform that features unique technical capabilities SAP customers won’t find anywhere else. As well as our proactive SAP Basis support for a customer’s production SAP landscape. ManagecoreiQ+ also includes project management where we serve as a customer advocate and liaison with the SAP team, this is all built on a body of practical experience with SAP that few SIs or other providers can attempt to match.
And then there’s one more important ingredient in the ManagecoreiQ+ mix: our hosting and management services for non-SAP workloads, SAP add-ons, legacy applications, and other workloads that complement a customer’s core SAP applications. This service addresses one of the most frustrating, and potentially disruptive, surprises that customers encounter when they jump into adapting RISE with SAP without the experience or knowledge to ask the right questions to surface these kinds of issues.
There’s another critical factor to understanding how—and why–Managecore works with customers to maximize the value of their RISE with SAP investments. Our commitment to working with customers and creating value for them doesn’t end when their production SAP environment goes live in the Cloud. Our support liaison (‘RISE coordinators’), security, monitoring, and other services are just as valuable—or in some cases much more valuable—as part of an ongoing relationship that covers the lifespan of their SAP applications.
After all, it’s one thing to be told how great the Cloud is for scaling your SAP environment; it’s another entirely to have 24/7 access to Managecore experts who can ensure that your SAP systems are optimized, tuned, secure, and configured to bring those capabilities to life.
Your New Favorite Thing: A ‘No Surprises’ SAP Migration
We know that any SAP migration will have its sources of stress and difficult (if not terrifying) moments. But we also know that with the right kinds of expert help and technical capabilities, making the jump to the Cloud can be an experience that is incredibly successful, fast, efficient, risk and trouble-free. And we can’t wait to give you the opportunity to experience that difference with your own SAP Cloud journey.
Want to know more about ManagecoreiQ+ and how it can help your company make the most of its RISE with SAP investment, check out >>> https://managecore.com/managecoreiq-on-rise-with-sap/
Frank is an experienced Information Technology executive that excels in high-level strategic and operational guidance to help manage and grow businesses. With 25 years experience in IT and over 19 of those years specifically in SAP, his thought leadership on industry trends, process improvement and best practices at SAP events, conferences and educational webinars are invaluable assets for companies. Frank provides his past experience in developing new technology initiatives with ever-evolving innovations to grow businesses and achieve high-performing solutions at a lower cost of ownership for your company.
