Many South African enterprises have not yet begun the process of migrating from legacy SAP to SAP S/4HANA – and, without a clear roadmap, these businesses may not have enough time to complete a successful migration before SAP’s 2027 deadline.
“With a little over six years until the deadline, it’s crucial that enterprises at least start their migration planning. While six years may seem like a long time, there are so many factors that businesses have not considered when it comes to a successful migration to S/4HANA,” says Mike Styer, country manager of GlassHouse Technology South Africa.
With almost 30 000 SAP licences in the country yet to be migrated, there are clearly thousands of businesses still needing to make the shift and the migration itself can take months to complete, even after careful planning has been factored in.
“A rough estimate with the figures we have on hand shows that over the next five years, for all enterprises in SA to be successfully migrated by the stipulated deadline, the industry will need to migrate at least one customer every day ten days,” says Styer.
Add to this, the required skills to make this happen are in somewhat short supply. The requirements that have been set aside by SAP requires particular certifications, not to mention the ability to provide case studies of successful migrations. Should you also want to move to the Azure Cloud at this time then you want to be dealing with a Partner who is capacitated in this arena.
“This means that there are only a select few Specialised Partners accredited by SAP and Microsoft that can help enterprises through this process. GlassHouse has the accreditation from both businesses, and the skills to complete the transformation migration process, but there are few partners that will either be available or able to complete migrations for South African customers as 2027 gets closer,” says Styer.
Without taking the proper considerations and planning for this migration into account, businesses may find themselves with either a rushed or incomplete migration, which has more significant implications for their business operations.
Styer suggests that, whether going it alone or working with a partner to migrate to S/4 HANA, enterprises need to start planning and executing now to avoid missing the deadline.
This article first appeared on IT Online.
