With the recent trends, customers have started focusing on building the core business capabilities and exploring innovations in this space with a reduced cost of ownership.
This brings the focus to efficiently manage the IT infrastructure which is anyway not the core skill the customer team will have, followed by other complexities like hardware obsolescence, license, datacenter exit, real estate, etc.,
Typically Business Heads’ common ask is “Why should we invest in hardware assets and build capability in managing such assets which are not our core competency and business KPIs”.
To optimize the TCO, as the first milestone in the journey, there are multiple avenues to reach the target state by migrating the SAP and non-SAP workloads to public/private cloud along with transformation initiatives (optional). One of the primary focus areas for any customer is to build the strategy around this to make sure that the overall migration process is smooth with no business interruption.
In some specific scenarios, customers strategically plan in this direction through their primary intention is not to migrate the systems to the cloud. However, drivers like datacenter exit, hardware obsolescence, etc., trigger such initiatives.
Key success criteria in any migration project are how well the overall methodology is designed for the migration considering the business/technical dependencies, system sequencing or wave planning, projects in the pipeline, etc., Critical phase here is to define the waves considering the dependencies and how many such waves are required to migrate the systems to cloud. Migration of non-SAP systems needs to be baked in the plan along with SAP systems which have tight integration with core SAP business systems.
Refer to the below link to read my blog published on SDN on wave planning that narrates key design principles and grouping methodology to be considered during this exercise.
https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/30/overview-on-wave-planning-during-migration-of-sap-systems-to-cloud/
I hope these insights are useful, do contact us for helping build the strategic roadmap for such initiatives.
