The top­ic of ​“should-I-stay or should-I-go” to the cloud for HR has been a hot one for SAP cus­tomers recent­ly. Last week, SAP announced its plan to build a new on-premise HCM for S/4HANA and DSAG (the Ger­man-speak­ing SAP user group) released its HR-focused sur­vey where most respon­dents planned to stick to on-premise HCM at least par­tial­ly. At the same time, SAP also unveiled its Upgrade2Success pro­gram, a set of tools and ser­vices intend­ed to ease the tran­si­tion from on-premise SAP ERP HCM to SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors in the cloud. 

Orig­i­nal­ly tabbed as ​“HCM Bridge to the Cloud” before the change to the more ambigu­ous Upgrade2Success, the pro­gram will include pre­de­fined con­fig­u­ra­tion accel­er­a­tors, process libraries, and inte­gra­tion and data migra­tion tools, per­son­al­ized road maps for HR trans­for­ma­tion, busi­ness case sup­port to demon­strate ROI of the project and what SAP calls ​“attrac­tive com­mer­cial terms that reflect exist­ing investments.” 

None of these com­po­nents are new, accord­ing to Stephen Spears, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors chief rev­enue offi­cer. The Upgrade2Success pro­gram is sim­ply a col­lec­tion of those exist­ing ser­vices pre­sent­ed in a sin­gle place. 

“What I was encoun­ter­ing as I looked at cus­tomers like Her­shey that had gone through the process of going from on-premise into Suc­cess­Fac­tors, what I couldn’t find is a nice set of repeat­able steps to tran­si­tion to the cloud,” says Spears, who spoke to ASUG­News recent­ly. ​“Cus­tomers will be able to go online and say here’s what I’ve got — now where is your busi­ness case, here are indus­try best prac­tices, here’s the time that will take out of a stan­dard imple­men­ta­tion then make the tran­si­tion from that point into tra­di­tion­al SI [sys­tem inte­gra­tor] mod­el or an actu­al offer­ing with struc­tured elements.” 

The SAP Part­ner Role

On the sur­face, Upgrade2Success looks like it might be fill­ing a role that SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors part­ners would oth­er­wise be doing, and in the process tak­ing rev­enue out of part­ner pock­ets. Spears doesn’t see it that way, giv­en that with around 14,000 SAP ERP HCM cus­tomers, the num­ber of full tran­si­tions to Suc­cess­Fac­tors is rel­a­tive­ly small. 

“What’s inter­est­ing is that over the course of the last five years, we have only seen 500 to 600 cus­tomers migrat­ing to [Suc­cess­Fac­tors] from [SAP ERP HCM],” says Spears. ​“We are going to cre­ate a ton of work for SIs.” 

SAP’s strat­e­gy for enabling part­ners in the Upgrade2Success pro­gram will involve ​“clear guid­ance” on imple­men­ta­tion prac­tices, con­vinc­ing the part­ners that this won’t encroach on their busi­ness and get­ting part­ners to rec­og­nize there are a mas­sive num­ber of on-premise HCM cus­tomers that are unsure how to move to the cloud, explains Spears. 

“SAP has been slow to adopt manda­to­ry suc­cess for part­ners,” says Spears. ​“When you look at the part­ner ecosys­tem, it is big and vibrant. It’s real­ly easy to under­stand how things get out of control.” 

With many part­ners build­ing up their SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors teams, but thus far rel­a­tive­ly few projects, there is con­cern for the qual­i­ty of imple­men­ta­tions going for­ward — espe­cial­ly if Upgrade2Success brings in more projects, as SAP hopes. Ensur­ing that imple­men­ta­tions go well is more than just giv­ing part­ners a set of guide­lines, posits Sher­ryanne Mey­er, ASUG HR com­mu­ni­ty advocate. 

“I don’t think ​‘clear guid­ance’ comes in the form of a pack­age of tools and ser­vices,” Mey­er says. ​“Project suc­cess will be reliant on a strong staff of experts who are real­ly there to help cus­tomers. That’s a vari­able SAP will need to manage.” 

Bot­tom Line for ASUG Members

SAP ERP HCM cus­tomers who are inter­est­ed in mov­ing to SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors don’t real­ly need to reach out to SAP about the Upgrade2Success pro­gram, it will be inte­grat­ed into SAP’s sales pitch. It won’t be free — it will be an option when buy­ing the soft­ware, but cer­tain­ly an option SAP will push. Again, there is noth­ing nec­es­sar­i­ly new here, these are things that SAP has offered before that are pack­aged togeth­er for the first time. 

Final­ly, even if Upgrade2Success offers bet­ter prepa­ra­tion and guid­ance for a cloud migra­tion, it will still be essen­tial to pick the right imple­men­ta­tion part­ners. As with any project, cus­tomers should still do their due dili­gence in part­ner selec­tion — like any large ecosys­tem there are good ones and less-good ones. Ensur­ing that a cloud upgrade is a suc­cess will come down to more than just help from SAP.