Paul Cooper, chair of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, UKISUG, said the financial incentives will help current ECC customers make the business case for moving to the cloud. For those running S/4HANA on premises, the business case for migrating to the cloud in order to access innovation they thought they were already paying for is less clear-cut.
“We’ll canvass the opinion of members who made the move to S/4HANA on-premises to see if the financial incentives offset the additional costs they’ll incur by moving to the cloud in order to access the latest innovations,” Cooper said. “But this is definitely a move in the right direction.”
Even so, not all on-premises customers will want to move core SAP systems under the Rise umbrella. “For those organizations, being able to access the latest innovations through SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) will be important if they’re not to be left behind,” he said. “This is an area we’ll continue to push SAP on, as we are led to believe there’s no technical reason why this isn’t possible.”
DSAG, the German-speaking SAP User Group, also appreciated the initiative and SAP’s willingness to recognize the investments its members had made in existing systems, while at the same time calling on SAP to further improve and expand the offering to take into account the complex requirements and challenges of enterprises opting for a transformation process to the cloud.
Managing migration costs
SAP is offering a credit against running costs — but the real problem is with implementation costs, according to Gilg.
“The ratio between what customers pay in subscription to us and what they pay to an implementation partner is still way off, in our perspective,” he said.
