The New Face of SAP Upgrades
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration

 

Traditionally, because of the effort involved, many if not most SAP customers tend to put off large-scale upgrades until the expiration of maintenance and support forces their hand (Read: high cost of customer-specific support/limitations of 3rd-party support). According to Panaya’s 2010 SAP Upgrade Benchmark Survey, end of maintenance is the primary reason to upgrade for 74% of R/3 4.6 users, 63% of R/3 4.7 users and 43% of ECC 5.0 users.

 

Times have changed. With its announcement on October 11th to deliver non-disruptive enhancements on a quarterly basis to SAP Business Suite 7 applications and SAP ERP 6.0, SAP in effect signaled the end to the old practice of issuing major releases and heralded the new era of ‘evolutionary innovation.’ So, what does this mean for SAP customers mapping out their upgrade strategy?

 

In SAP parlance, evolutionary innovation means the non-disruptive delivery of incremental enhancements to the suite of SAP software products from which SAP customers can selectively choose and prioritize implementation in a manner that best suites their unique business needs, operational challenges and growth goals.

 

In conjunction with this, SAP announced the five-year extension of mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 applications, including SAP ERP 6.0, from December 2015 to December 2020. In essence, this means that the core SAP platform will remain stable and unchanged for at least eight years.

 

Read SAP Press Release

 

Quarterly enhancements and extended maintenance protect SAP customers from the cost, complexity and disruption inherent in the large, monolithic upgrades of the past while freeing them to innovate at their own pace without fear of obsolescence.

 

The ability to select discrete enhancements and stagger the timing of their implementation makes it substantially easier for SAP customers to perform a cost/benefit analysis, determine the ultimate return-on investment, and build a bulletproof business case for upgrading -- vital activities difficult to execute with a high degree of confidence for the traditional large-scale upgrade approach.

 

There’s significant, compelling value to be gained from an ECC 6.0 upgrade -- from the stability and visibility gained by SAP’s new enhancement delivery and extended maintenance to the SOA enablement that comes with ECC 6.0 to the 300+ new features and functionality of ECC 6.0 to the customization capability for 28 industries ECC 6.0 offers, etc.

 

Moving forward, leveraging its new evolutionary innovation approach, SAP will no doubt make the case for upgrading to ECC 6.0 even more compelling.

But here it is important to note that SAP is not only looking forward with respect to its product roadmap.

 

The flip side of evolutionary innovation is what SAP dubs ‘design thinking,’ a central tenet of which is ‘thinking back to move forward.’

 

In the context of SAP product development, design thinking means bringing new capabilities and enhanced value to a customer’s existing SAP landscape, as opposed to only offering these new capabilities through new releases.

 

Recent examples of SAP exercising the principle of design thinking include its efforts to make two of its most innovative new products, HANA and Gateway, compatible with all ERP releases back to 4.6C, a release version for which SAP has also extended mainstream maintenance -- from the scheduled date of December 31, 2010 to March of 2013.

 

Giving customers maximum flexibility with regards to deciding whether or not to upgrade, when they will upgrade, and how they will upgrade certainly puts a new face on the upgrade process for enterprise technology, and SAP stands alone among tier-one business management software vendors with its generous leeway and liberal timeline for upgrades.

 

Nearly two thirds of SAP customers have upgraded to ECC 6.0, giving it the fastest adoption rate of any major release in SAP history, and SAP users who’ve not yet upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0 should waste no more time in putting together their upgrade plan.

 

ECC 6.0 is the backbone of the SAP application environment, and missing out on ECC 6.0 enhancements that SAP will deliver at an accelerated pace over the coming quarters -- particularly in the areas of enterprise mobility, in-memory technology and cloud computing -- will place them at a marked competitive disadvantage, perhaps more quickly than what was possible in the past.

 

To learn more about the SAP Business Suite Strategy, attend the ASUG Upgrade Webinar Series (ASUG membership required).