SAP says GenAI will help solve legacy migration skills shortage

SAP has claimed that its systems integrator partners will avoid a skills crunch in the looming 2027 support deadline by using GenAI to get to grips with legacy software.

Speaking to The Register, David Robinson, SAP president and chief revenue officer for cloud ERP, said fears of a skills crisis in the SAP user world could be alleviated as third-party SIs take advantage of the LLMs and other forms of machine learning to accelerate migrations.

Mainstream support for legacy SAP ERP platform ECC expires on December 31, 2027, after which more limited "extended support" will be available. Only ECC instances on "Enhancement Pack" EHP6 and later will qualify for the extension; the remainder will see support end at the close of 2025.

Gartner figures from the second quarter of 2024 showed only 37 percent of ECC customers had licensed S/4HANA — SAP's current recommended ERP platform, which was launched in 2015, compared with 34 percent in the same quarter last year. Gartner said there was little evidence that migrations to S/4HANA were taking place at the rate needed to meet the support deadline.

The cliff-edge timetable has provoked concern from users and third parties. The risk from their point of view is that while potentially thousands of user organizations struggle to get off ECC at the same time, systems integrators may not be able to hire enough experienced people to meet demand.

Robinson told us that by using GenAI systems, integrators could help mitigate the risks.

"I think about supply and demand. This topic does come up often. It is definitely something that's on the minds of our customers," he said.

The SAP president reckons the problem could be broken down into business process expertise and technical know-how – and genAI could help with both. "There is the ability to look at documents and plan for current state business process, and how that maps to a future state business process. What are best-in-class, standardized business processes, and then what customers want to do to maybe adapt those to differentiate themselves, or if they have unique requirements, the ability to know how to manage that and document it," he said.

"I see GenAI specifically in the hands of our partners — longstanding global systems integrators — helping reduce the time and cost associated with documenting what the current process looks like, assessing the delta between the as-is and the to-be around a business process. That can be reduced by between 50 and 80 percent in terms of time and cost, because a lot of the time and cost there is associated with just the data gathering and the process of documenting it. There are fewer resources necessary to get the same outcome, and to some degree, the outcomes might even be better," he said.

Secondly, SaaS tools can help reduce the IT resources required for application migration projects, Robinson said.

"I see more and more of SaaS capabilities taking out the cost and complexity of preparing systems or de-conflicting stacks, and trying to understand whether you have the right types of memory and the right geography and all of that infrastructure, architectural planning and risk mitigation," he said.

Robinson also said SAP had "engineered out" much of the complexity of on-prem architectures. "We've abstracted away all of the underlying infrastructure, architectural analysis and management. [Customers are no longer] required to maintain an entire area of expertise around infrastructure and capacity planning at a very tedious technical level," he said.

Earlier this month, the UK and Ireland SAP User Group chair said organizations on SAP's legacy on-prem ERP systems would be wise to upgrade their software before they move to the cloud, eschewing the vendor's preferred method as a first step. Conor Riordan said users were cautious about migrating ECC to the cloud and the latest S/4HANA ERP system at the same time, preferring instead to upgrade on-prem, and only then move to the cloud.

In January 2021, the enterprise software giant launched RISE with SAP to lift and shift complex SAP environments into public, private, and hybrid clouds to help customers get to a new architecture working with one hand to shake, facilitating partnership deals with cloud hyperscalers, systems integrators, and other third parties.

SAP's Robinson told The Register it stood by its recommendation to move to the cloud and upgrade at the same time, despite users' concerns about the risks.

"Certainly, fewer hops are better, so fewer hops are preferred. It's usually more valuable. It helps keep the business closer to the IT process, and it usually is more cost-efficient and has a better business case," he said.

One of the challenges with upgrading ECC is many users have customized the system to their business process, sometimes over decades, sometimes keeping scant records of the system's development.

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Robinson said new tooling and methods were improving insight into an existing ECC estate and reducing risks. "In the past, that's all been a big black box of unknowns in the absence of clarity about the ECC environment and the implications of unwinding some of those customizations. We've now opened up that box, and we're providing more clarity and confidence through tooling and documented methodologies," he said.

Working with partners to better understand their ECC estate, customers were becoming more confident about the trade-offs and risks associated with the migration options, Robinson said.

But there is still a long way to go. Given the number of ECC users still setting out on their migration, the next couple of years will test SAP's application of GenAI for the purpose of migrating and re-platforming enterprise business applications. ®