Three Key Benefits of SAP’s New Upgrade Policy

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

An SAP system represents a significant investment, and the upgrade strategy SAP customers decide upon will have profound and lasting business performance and IT ramifications. Accordingly, it is best to base an upgrade strategy on solid research and a thorough understanding of a company’s specific business process innovation needs.

When mapping out a roadmap for upgrading SAP, here are three key benefits of SAP’s new ERP upgrade policy to consider:

Stability and visibility

Historically, SAP upgrades consisted of large, comprehensive releases that compelled users to upgrade regularly in order to take advantage of new functionality. In contrast to this, SAP’s new policy for upgrading will consist of multiple, smaller releases of tightly focused functional enhancement packages. In essence, this means that the core mySAP platform will remain stable and unchanged for several years. This stability and consequent visibility protects customers from the cost and complexity inherent in monolithic upgrades while freeing them to innovate without fear of obsolescence.

Easier ROI

Second, by issuing smaller, less costly functional enhancement packages, SAP has made it substantially easier to build an ROI case for upgrading. By allowing customers to selectively pick and choose only those capabilities that align with their specific business needs, SAP’s new `a la carte upgrade policy is considerably less costly in terms of both money and resources. Customers have the flexibility to move forward at their own pace, enhancing the value of their ERP systems incrementally, which greatly simplifies the process of building a business case, performing a cost/benefit analysis and determining ultimate return-on investment.

Easier migration to SOA

Based on the NetWeaver platform, mySAP ERP 2005’s functional enhancement packages are inherently geared toward enterprise services. As such, SAP’s new upgrade policy presents an innovative, iterative approach for implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA). On this score, SAP is miles ahead of Oracle and is a considerably safer choice given the company’s proven heritage and organic SOA roadmap. In addition to the many functional enhancement packages issued directly by SAP on a regular basis, customers will also have available to them a wealth of industry-specific composite applications developed by the rapidly increasing number of SAP xApps Certified partners. In effect, SAP’s policy of providing upgrade enhancement packages serves well as a harbinger of how all enterprise system upgrades will happen in the dawning era of service oriented architecture.