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

The strategic realignment of ERP marks a paradigm shift that has profound business, technical and organizational implications for the entire SAP community and is accompanied by analysts, DSAG user representatives and partners with both criticism and hope. It is a roadmap from the stable but rigid on-prem world to a dynamic but licensing and technically challenging cloud universe in which SAP is no longer the sole fixed star, but a sun in a system of hyperscalers, data specialists such as Databricks and Snowflake and powerful consulting firms.

At the heart of this ERP transformation is the realization that the digital nucleus of the existing SAP customer must be kept clean - the so-called clean core strategy. In order to increase the speed of innovation and ensure the maintainability of an S/4 system or the new Business Suite, modifications and enhancements are rigorously banned from the core and moved to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). The BTP acts as the technical centerpiece, as a „PaaS“ (Platform-as-a-Service) offering that bundles development, integration, automation, data management and artificial intelligence.

SAP BTP is the place where the future of composable ERP can take place, while the „traditional“ ERP core in the form of S/4 becomes the stable system of record. But this brave new world of Composable ERP brings with it massive technical and organizational challenges. SAP BTP is not a monolithic block - some say not even a platform - but a heterogeneous construction kit consisting of various runtime environments such as Cloud Foundry, Kyma (Kubernetes) and the Abap environment, which is particularly emotional for regular SAP customers and has become known under the code name „Steampunk“.

E3 Cover story February 2026

If an existing SAP customer believes the Rise with SAP promise, then neither a CCC nor a CCoE will be needed in the future: However, this is merely marketing and an empty promise from SAP. Numerous existing SAP customers and partners from the SAP community have reported in recent months that the opposite is true: those who signed a Rise with SAP contract usually had to expand their SAP Basis team (Customer Center of Expertise) or outsource additional tasks to service providers. Rise really does create a lot of work!

As a result, SAP's idea of the CCoE became a testing ground for SAP Basis support. Why? With an SAP ERP system in the cloud, not a single problem from the previous ERP/ECC 6.0 system has been solved. System copies, authorization management, user administration, monitoring and automation, batches and program updates, etc. are still on the agenda of the in-house IT team. Some tasks can be delegated to SAP via a Rise ticket system, but SAP itself does not act proactively within the framework of a Rise contract – existing SAP customers must create a ticket for each job. S/4 expertise, IT administration, and enterprise architecture therefore remain the responsibility of a CCoE.

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The traditional on-prem model, in which the software is operated on the company's own hardware, offers ERP users full control over data, business processes and licenses. It also enables complete control and adaptability of compliance measures and individual business processes (Abap modifications). However, this ERP autonomy comes at a high price: On-prem solutions are associated with high acquisition costs for hardware and software, must be designed for potential load peaks, which causes unnecessarily high costs, and are heavily affected by the shortage of skilled workers and dependent on qualified IT personnel required for 24/7 operation. In addition, legacy systems are often unable to support new technologies such as AI or analytics. However, existing SAP customers can switch to the Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which can also be operated in combination with an on-prem Business Suite 7.

The public cloud of hyperscalers (such as AWS, Azure or GCP) takes the opposite approach: it offers services publicly via the internet, uses a multi-tenant structure and attracts customers with high flexibility and elastic scalability as well as usage-based billing (pay-as-you-go). However, this convenience is not risk-free for existing SAP customers. The assumption that the public cloud is generally more cost-effective than in-house operation has not proven to be true in recent years. Many existing SAP customers have optimally orchestrated their data centers in recent years.

On the other hand, ERP users report a feeling of helplessness in the event of service outages, as there is no direct access to the data center and their own IT staff. And the concept of cloudification does not automatically mean simplification, as the complexity of data center operations, see also Rise with SAP, remains. There is also the risk of vendor lock-in and security concerns, as valuable company data is located outside the company firewall.

Cover story November 2025

AI and its many variants have initiated a technical development that is of even greater importance for companies. The current development of AI, which includes all generative AI (see also SAP BTP GenAI Hub), is in an early phase of organizational acceptance and testing in 2025. Numerous proof-of-concepts and new products are being developed in this phase. This growth will be driven by the ability of organizations to improve their technology foundation through more automation, faster decision making and greater agility, while scaling quickly to meet the demands of the global digital economy.

In a FutureScape study, IDC presents an analysis of the implications for organizations of leveraging innovations in artificial intelligence, particularly GenAI. The study identifies and evaluates ten key predictions for intelligent ERP applications that will be critical over the next five years. SAP legacy customers continue to focus on innovation and digital transformation, including modernizing their enterprise applications to SaaS and cloud technology. Generative AI is having a profound impact as it evolves and is applied to existing workflows.

"Enterprises are facing numerous technology activities, including digital transformation, modernizing enterprise applications, automating workflows, experimenting with artificial intelligence, and enabling streamlined processes to support employees in their workflows," said Mickey North Rizza, IDC Group Vice President, Enterprise Software. According to IDC, the way the digital worker (AI agent) uses enterprise applications will fundamentally change. The focus will shift to more native AI applications.

AI can become a turning point in administration, for example through automated document recognition, chatbots or data-based decision support. However, for this to succeed, a government AI strategy is needed that takes equal account of data protection, feasibility and standards. Particularly in view of the growing importance of AI, the SAP user association DSAG is calling for ethical guidelines, transparency and comprehensible framework conditions. AI must be explainable, secure and non-discriminatory.

From DSAG's point of view, it is crucial that only correct data flows into the AI and that its use is not unchecked. "The public sector must be put in a position to make independent and well-founded technological decisions. With regard to AI, public administration must therefore first build up the relevant expertise," explained Hermann-Josef Haag, DSAG Board Member for Human Resources and Public Sector. This includes not only knowledge and control of the technologies used, but also the ability to create a framework for open standards, data portability and long-term maintainability.

Cover story October 2025

For existing SAP customers, the transition to the S/4 world has now become unavoidable. On the one hand, this is due to the announcement that mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 (ERP/ECC 6.0) will only be offered until the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance until the end of 2030 and possibly 2033. On the other hand, however, this technical leap is inextricably linked to a far-reaching realignment in terms of licensing law and business management. SAP's ambition to transform itself from a pure software provider into a cloud company is clear. The Group management, represented by CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam, sees the cloud as the decisive strategic measure for achieving the forecast revenue growth and generating a stable, calculable income through subscription models. Revenue from the cloud has now become a substantial revenue stream for SAP. For many long-standing users, cloud migration represents a challenge that is often associated with skepticism and the desire for hybrid landscapes.

A central element of SAP's cloud strategy, particularly in the context of RISE with SAP, is the FUE concept. FUE is the conversion key that determines how existing on-prem licenses are transformed into cloud subscriptions. It is a complex set of rules with detailed instructions on how to make the transition from the traditional on-prem model to the cloud.

The FUE metric aims to simplify license management by converting the previous usage-based user categories into authorization-based equivalents. SAP defines specific conversion factors for different S/4 Cloud usage types: One FUE corresponds to one S/4 for Advanced Use (comparable to Professional User in the on-prem area), one FUE also corresponds to five S/4 for Core Use (comparable to Functional User) and one FUE corresponds to thirty S/4 for Self-Service Use.

Cover story September 2025