There’s an old say­ing in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy cir­cles when the dis­cus­sion turns to plat­form-lev­el shifts and mas­sive sea-change, water­shed moments of devel­op­ment. Peo­ple will inevitably ask: When is the next big thing? The safe answer is always, ​“About five years.” 

The next Twit­ter, the next Inter­net of Things (IoT), the next cloud com­put­ing mod­el, the next resur­gence of inter­est in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and the next quan­tum com­put­ing rev­o­lu­tion typ­i­cal­ly come about in rough­ly half-decade cycles. That is why the five-year plan is so often used to describe the shape of so many strate­gic road maps. 

As we stand in 2018, SAP prob­a­bly has a vari­ety of five-year plans play­ing out through­out its com­bined soft­ware stacks, but it is the sev­en-year plan lead­ing up to 2025 that may be of high­er interest. 

A Plug-Pulling Moment 

What SAP wants to do between now and 2025 is to pre­pare for a time when it will end main­stream main­te­nance on all instances of ERP instal­la­tions that were orig­i­nat­ed in the era before SAP S/4HANA. This plug pulling moment impacts soft­ware includ­ing SAP Busi­ness Suite with its con­stituent ele­ments of CRM, SCM, PLM, and SCM func­tions. SAP also wants to bring an end to its cur­rent main­te­nance pro­gram for SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (typ­i­cal­ly known as SAP ECC) as the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of the company’s ERP software. 

This should come as no major sur­prise. SAP clear­ly wants to bring its user base for­ward into the SAP HANA and SAP Leonar­do years, which them­selves, by con­ve­nient coin­ci­dence, are two brands that came into being rough­ly five years apart between 2012 and 2017 respec­tive­ly. So as SAP plans to have all its appli­ca­tions deliv­ered as SAP S/4HANA apps by 2025, what kind of mechan­ics will it need to focus on? 

Some of what hap­pens on the road to 2025 is played out in defined sub­spaces of the SAP uni­verse. As a suit­able exam­ple, it was back in July 2016 that SAP entered into an agree­ment with autho­rized reseller Appe­on to allow the firm to devel­op a new gen­er­a­tion of the Power­Builder rapid appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment plat­form, orig­i­nal­ly acquired from Sybase. Users of this tech­nol­o­gy can already think about a stand-alone future. 

SAP still has an inter­est in its installed base of lega­cy con­tracts that span tech­nolo­gies not quite as fash­ion­ably fab­u­lous as SAP HANA and SAP Leonar­do, but the firm has not been with­out crit­i­cism in this space. We all know where its favorites lie and it has been open­ly dis­cussing its road to 2025. 

Sub­strate-Lev­el Com­put­ing Fabric 

Oth­er ele­ments of this sto­ry play out as rather more upfront sur­face lev­el devel­op­ments, even if the tech­nol­o­gy itself is still essen­tial­ly low­er-lev­el com­put­ing fab­ric and oper­at­ing-sys­tem-lev­el engineering. 

As the pre­ferred oper­at­ing sys­tem for SAP S/4HANA, SUSE glob­al alliances team mem­bers Dirk Oppenkows­ki and Sabine Soell­heim insist that SAP has cho­sen open-source, open plat­form com­put­ing as a key strate­gic move going forward. 

“Only an open-source infra­struc­ture can assist with the scal­a­bil­i­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty need­ed for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion now — and in the decade to come. SUSE and SAP have years of col­lec­tive his­to­ry and the move to SAP S/4HANA is the right tech­nol­o­gy at the right time, as migra­tion is an inevitabil­i­ty that should be real­ized soon­er rather than lat­er,” insist Oppenkows­ki and Soellheim. 

Key fac­tors for the dig­i­tal­ly trans­for­ma­tive sev­en-year road ahead include open plat­form skills and plain and sim­ple usabil­i­ty. Sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors need a con­sole-style user inter­face to be able to per­form sys­tem authen­ti­ca­tion inte­gra­tion actions. These same users will ben­e­fit from guides that help sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors quick­ly adapt to sys­tem operations. 

Pre­scribed Pre­con­fig­u­ra­tion Pre­req­ui­sites 

SAP cus­tomers may now have a few tough deci­sions to make regard­ing which lega­cy plat­forms they main­tain, regard­less of SAP’s plans. They also need to con­sid­er which 2025 SAP S/4HANA road map tech­nolo­gies they will start to bring online (or get ready for) now in 2018. Not all plat­forms are cre­at­ed equal, so it will be impor­tant to look for auto­mat­ed tools and opti­mized pre­con­fig­ured solu­tions that speed up deploy­ment and life­cy­cle man­age­ment on premise, in a pri­vate cloud, or a pub­lic cloud. 

Some of those tools will be SAP tools and some may reside with lega­cy soft­ware providers: This is a big ask and a com­plex job, so it will be impor­tant to look for these auto­mat­ed soft­ware lay­ers (tool sets or wider plat­forms) where they exist. 

To put all of the above point in sim­pler terms: This is tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture shift­ing, so a cook­ie-cut­ter approach will almost cer­tain­ly not work. 

We’re mov­ing from a world with SAP R/3 where there was a choice between IBM DB2, Ora­cle, Microsoft SQL Serv­er, or indeed Sybase ASE to world of SAP HANA. SUSE’s Oppenkows­ki has said that, cer­tain­ly for large orga­ni­za­tions, mov­ing a huge chunk of NetWeaver deploy­ments off R/3 is a gar­gan­tu­an task, even in a sev­en-year time frame. 

POC First, Infra­struc­ture Second 

As in the famous Gary Lar­son car­toon, this is a case of ​“First pants, THEN… your shoes.” Except this time, it’s first to devel­op a proof of con­cept (POC), THEN shift to the infra­struc­ture. The actu­al nature of the tech­nol­o­gy in this instance (clue: we do mean the cloud here) should (in the­o­ry, at least) make the proof-of-con­cept work eas­i­er and more achievable. 

The cloud gives us the abil­i­ty to spin up sand­box test-beds far more quick­ly and flu­id­ly than tra­di­tion­al com­put­ing infra­struc­tures did. So per­haps now is the time to start the POC plan­ning process­es along with the hunt for the right pre­con­fig­u­ra­tion and automa­tion tooling. 

The plug is ulti­mate­ly being pulled, but for now, the bath­wa­ter is still warm. So start spin­ning the rub­ber duck through some new routines.