Thomas Failer, founder and Group CEO of Swiss-based Data Migration International, sees the current situation as a historic opportunity for the SAP community. Failer firmly believes that companies that set the right course now will emerge stronger from the transformation. His vision is that of a data-driven company that can react agilely to market changes because it is not shackled by its own past. For him, his offering JiVS IMP (Information Management Platform) is the key to breaking these shackles.

Thomas Failer often talks about the need for existing SAP customers to stop seeing data as something to be hoarded. Instead, we should see data as a river that flows through the company and is used where it is needed. The rigid silos of legacy systems need to be broken down. The Group CEO of Swiss Data Migration International is convinced that the separation of infrastructure, application and data is the only way to remain flexible in the long term.

„Data independence is the ability of companies to manage their data independently of the applications in which it was originally generated until it is deleted in a legally compliant manner,“ explains Thomas Failer in an exclusive E3 interview. „This makes it necessary to separate the operational systems from the historical information. It is this information that usually clogs up the operational systems as hard-to-digest data ballast or lies fallow in archives and is therefore useless for the business. This separation enables seamless lifecycle management and audit-proof access.“

The SAP community is facing a turning point comparable in scope to the Y2K problem or the introduction of the euro, but with far more complex architectural and strategic implications. For many existing customers, the switch to S/4 is no longer a pure technical necessity, but a forced march into a new era whose rules are often being rewritten while the game is still being played.

At the center of this storm is data management - a discipline that has been managed for decades as a necessary evil in the basement of IT departments and is now suddenly deciding the weal and woe of entire corporate strategies. S/4 Hana is not just a new release; it is a paradigm shift based on the Hana in-memory database and requires a fundamental clean-up of historical legacy issues. Anyone who stumbles here risks not only exploding project costs, but also the failure of the entire digital transformation. „Data independence is indeed the central aspect of data sovereignty, but not the only one. It is the prerequisite for taking the other aspects into consideration in the first place,“ emphasizes Thomas Failer.

Cover story March 2026