At a glance:
- Under the “Rise with SAP”, IBM’s ERP transformation will one of the largest compared to Microsoft. In March 2022, the company announced its own adoption of Rise with SAP for the first stages of its move to S/4HANA.
- We are moving over 375TB of data into the cloud and consolidating 300 instances into one global instance in the cloud.
- We are very engaged with SAP and are leveraging SAP Consulting on the project alongside IBM Consulting, and an SAP executive will be on our steering committee.
IBM is upgrading from SAP’s legacy ECC software to the cloud-ready S/4HANA. The company is towards massive ERP modernization and shifting its core on-premises systems to Power servers running in its own cloud. Under the “Rise with SAP”, IBM’s ERP transformation will one of the largest as compared to Microsoft. In March 2022, the company announced its own adoption of Rise with SAP for the first stages of its move to S/4HANA.
In Feb 2022, IBM was named as SAP’s first premium supplier for rise. This designation was given when IBM combined its advisory, implementation, and application management services from IBM Consulting with technical managed services from IBM Cloud. This was named as “Breakthrough with IBM for Rise with SAP.”
According to Joanne Wright, the company’s vice president of enterprise operations and services, IBM’s internal transformation will be the first one managed under the Breakthrough offering. The software which is IBM’s its largest and most profitable business segment accounted for $24 billion of its $57 billion revenue in 2021. IBM now has simplified and harmonized processes, eliminating complexity and customization and introducing more flexibility after moving to S/4HANA. “We’ve been able to deliver touchless process capabilities for the bulk of our transactions,” said Wright.
Training Teams
In a series of two-week sprints, IBM has already migrated the quote-to-cash processes for its $13 billion subscription-based software business to S/4HANA. Wright said, “With the rest of the software segment to follow by year-end. After that will come technology services next year, then consulting some time in 2024.”
Wright says, “IBM has been training the teams who will migrate and then operate the new platform in other business segments using its internal learning platform.” She hopes that their collaboration will also have helped educate SAP about running other customers’ workloads on IBM Power Systems. “We’ve helped them, I think, to be trained up and enabled on Power and Red Hat,” she said. “This is our technology stack, and the opportunity for us was to be ‘client zero.’ We wanted to be a user of the experience that our clients would have,” said Wright.
Moving towards ERP Transformation.
“We are very engaged with SAP and are leveraging SAP Consulting on the project alongside IBM Consulting, and an SAP executive will be on our steering committee,” she said. “We also have top to top alignment with SAP as a strategic partner.”
Proving Wright’s point, SAP CEO Christian Klein mentioned IBM’s ERP transformation early in his opening keynote at Sapphire, SAP’s annual customer event in Orlando. “Take IBM, a great partner, and as a customer we are helping them now, with Rise with SAP, to transform their portfolio, investing into new business and divesting other businesses in an agile fashion,” Klein said, adding: “We are moving over 375TB of data into the cloud and consolidating 300 instances into one global instance in the cloud.”
