Following “Rise with SAP”: 3 questions SAP ECC customers need to ask right now

By Peter Russo, VP, ERP Product Marketing, Oracle

This week, SAP announced “Rise with SAP,” a program that includes the ability to “lift and shift” legacy, on-premise SAP ECC and S/4HANA and host them on a hyperscaler/IaaS as a subscription, as well as the acquisition of Signavio, a process mining tool, similar to SAP partners Celonis and IBIS’ Star+. The program begs the question: with no SaaS ERP option available from SAP, how is extending your reliance on highly customized applications (that are difficult and expensive to adapt) positioning you for success? Is it postponing the inevitable migration you need to remain competitive in your market?

For SAP ECC customers, we believe it’s important to consider these 3 questions:

1. How and when will SAP deliver business innovation at the speed of today’s business?
   • The pandemic highlighted the need to modernize mission critical processes and has accelerated digital transformation by 5-6 years, as estimated by McKinsey and others. Does hosting ECC or S/4 help you respond and keep up with accelerating change?
   • Are you receiving the innovation you need—like the ability to close the books and report remotely? Have faster, more agile planning cycles? Quickly pivot your supply chains and business models?
   • Is your ERP an appreciating asset? Layering subscription on a hosted version of yesterday’s ERP simply means you pay the same amount for an ever-depreciating asset. Contrast that with modern cloud ERP that delivers continuous innovation and updates your applications for you—so that every month, you’re paying the same amount for better software.

2. How does hosting legacy ERP support future agility? Won’t there be yet another migration from here whenever an SAP SaaS ERP arrives?
   • Does hosting ECC or S/4 reduce technical debt and support your move to standard, highly automated processes? How will this support a unified view of your business?
   • Even with process mining, which was already available through a plethora of partners, if your destination is still private cloud (on-premise ECC or S/4 hosted on a hyperscaler), how will this drive sustainability, agility and automation of your core processes?
   • As an ECC customer, will you be forced to migrate to S/4HANA?
   • When will a SaaS ERP be available from SAP and how difficult will that migration be?

3. As opposed to just working directly with a hyperscaler, what added value does SAP offer, and what strings are attached?
   • Is SAP Cloud Platform the right platform to extend your solutions, or are the tools from leading cloud providers like Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google more robust?
   • What value does SAP deliver around advanced security and scale that cloud providers don’t offer already, at a higher level and lower cost?
   • Will this new subscription for your legacy ERP lock you in, again? What are the real benefits to your business?

Customers deserve performance, not promises

SAP’s ERP strategy is clearly in sharp contrast to the ongoing shift to SaaS ERP. As industry analyst and founder of TechVentive, Brian Sommer, recently put it: “Companies don’t want a driveway full of tools and car parts, they just want to get in a car and drive. They want solutions—and if they hear a bunch of futuristic plans and ideas and see a few prototypes of things a vendor might someday make available, they don’t want that. They want to hear that there is something they can take advantage of and take home and implement today.”

Over 10 years ago, predicting a dramatic shift in the ERP market, Oracle made a big bet on a full suite of integrated, highly automated cloud business applications that support the planning and decision-making needs of larger organizations. Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP is built and delivered on the highly secure and advanced Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. And, in 2016, Oracle acquired Netsuite, bringing SaaS ERP to small and midsize companies. Over 31,500 customers rely on cloud ERP from Oracle today to drive business performance and help prepare for whatever is next.

The next frontier of business is being shaped right now and every part of your business and IT investment strategy needs to be reassessed in this context. Looking through this lens, you have the choice of being cemented to your past or evaluating how modern cloud applications can help you chart and navigate your future.

Oracle Cloud ERP is a platform for excellence and business innovation.

• It’s forever modern. Every day at work, you’re on the latest version, offering the ability to move faster across finance, project management, supply chain, procurement and planning, continuously applying new advancements. It’s an asset that appreciates.
• It orchestrates business across your products and services, operations and experiences, unifying data through highly automated processes coupled with planning and analytics that proactively identify, predict and suggest, so you can move before problems and ahead of trends.
• It adapts to you. Oracle Cloud ERP is built on a leading, Gen 2 cloud infrastructure with OCI; business capabilities are consumed modularly; and it can be extended with 3rd parties or composed natively with no/low-code apps. Legacy apps can continue in parallel to Oracle Cloud ERP capabilities, where it makes sense for you, on the same native cloud infrastructure to improve operations, integration and ROI.

What’s the bottom line? Oracle is helping thousands of customers drive their business performance with Cloud ERP today, not making vague promises about what might come in the future.

Don’t take our word for it. See what the analysts are saying. In fact, you might be surprised to see in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, that Oracle Cloud ERP is the ONLY Leader in their study. And you might be more surprised to see who’s not even listed!

Be part of the next frontier of business with Oracle Cloud ERP. Learn more at: https://www.oracle.com/erp/

_{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, Tim Faith, Duy Nguyen, Denis Torii, Paul Schenck, Christian Hestermann, 22 June 2020}

_{Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}