Under the RISE with SAP banner, Microsoft has begun transitioning its internal SAP systems to S/4HANA. By selecting RISE, Microsoft is putting SAP in charge of the licensing, technical management, hosting, and support of its SAP applications under a single SLA — even though Microsoft will eventually host its S/4HANA occurrences in its own Azure cloud, and that some of the relocation work will be performed by third parties.
Microsoft’s migration to S/4HANA will serve two purposes: it will modernize its legacy SAP systems before the end of mainstream support in 2027, and it will demonstrate to customers that it is capable of hosting and running one of the world’s largest and most complex SAP installations within the RISE framework. All three of the main cloud providers offer SAP apps for their clients, and all three use SAP for at least some of their internal financial systems.
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Microsoft has been using SAP internally since at least 1995; Amazon.com is said to have switched to SAP for its finances in 2008, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is set to replace part of its Oracle financial systems with SAP in April 2021. Microsoft, on the other hand, is the first to use the RISE with SAP offering. Microsoft’s engineering team has extensive experience with complicated SAP projects: It finished migrating internal traditional SAP systems from dedicated servers to its Azure cloud last year, a step-by-step approach that now provides it with a blueprint for managing the S/4HANA transfer.
Couto is more accustomed to assisting joint SAP and Microsoft clients in migrating their apps to the Azure cloud, but he has been closely involved in conversations regarding the S/4HANA transfer with his colleagues at Microsoft Digital, the company’s own IT services business. Despite the fact that the corporations are only now announcing the agreement, work on the move has already begun.
Among the problems to be resolved, he added, are who would provide which services and how interfaces with surrounding Microsoft platforms that are not core of the RISE offering will be developed. Couto stated that he expects to be ready to publish the outcomes of this first phase later this year, and that as the migration process progresses, new partners will get engaged.
According to SAP’s head of strategic engineering alliances, Stefan Goebel, untangling decades of modifications will be a challenge for Microsoft, but not the most difficult. “Change management will undoubtedly be the most difficult problem to begin with, whether it’s SAP or anything else.” If you have software that was installed 20 years ago, it’s going to be a lot of effort.”
Source: CIO