Lemongrass Offers New Migration Platform As SAP Customers Move To The Cloud

Services provider and SAP partner Lemongrass is promising ‘near-zero downtime’ with its Cloud Platform Migrate software and services for moving huge volumes of SAP-related data to hyperscaler cloud platforms.

Lemongrass CEO Mike Rosenbloom

Lemongrass, a leading software-enabled services provider and SAP partner, has launched Lemongrass Cloud Platform Migrate, a combination of software and services used to help customers migrate their SAP systems and related data to hyperscale cloud platforms with near-zero downtime.

The new Lemongrass offering comes as a growing number of SAP customers are adopting SAP’s cloud-based offerings, including the cloud edition of the flagship S/4HANA suite of cloud applications, and moving their SAP workloads to major cloud platforms.

Another driver: SAP’s fast-approaching 2027 deadline for ending support for its aging Business Suite 7 applications (and its SAP ECC core ERP system) is also accelerating customer migration to the cloud, said Lemongrass CEO Mike Rosenbloom in an interview with CRN.

[Related: SAP Partner Lemongrass Improves Platform For DevOps Users]

SAP recently reported that in its 2023 second quarter cloud revenue grew 19 percent year over year to €3.32 billion ($3.64 billion) and S/4HANA cloud revenue grew 74 percent to €823 million ($903 million).

While some companies are adopting SAP’s S/4HANA and moving to the cloud at the same time, Rosenbloom said many Lemongrass customers are taking a more staged approach.

“Last year we grew over 50 percent, revenue-wise in U.S. dollars, because of that demand,” Rosenbloom said of the developments in the SAP application arena. “A lot of customers are saying: ‘Well, If I’m going to do this [application upgrade] project, I might be able to execute it more easily in the cloud by leveraging the flexibility and agility I get once I’m in the cloud [and not] trying to get to S/4HANA in one step.’”

Lemongrass hasn’t seen any slackening of demand due to the uncertain economy. “I would argue that most of the work we do is considered to have a positive business case,” Rosenbloom said. “Even in an economy that has risk or concern for businesses, we haven’t seen early projects stopping because in many cases the project is a means to generate a return on investment. They’re trying to reduce their total cost of ownership of running SAP.”

The cloud platform hyperscalers also see “a massive opportunity” to capture SAP users as they migrate to the cloud, Rosenbloom said. He cited an often-quoted statistic that every $1 of SAP-generated consumption in their cloud generates an additional $8 to $10 in “data gravity” – the tendency of large datasets to attract other datasets, applications and services.

The Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) is Lemongrass’ flagship governance, management and automation orchestration solution that businesses and organizations use to optimize the operations of their SAP applications and foundational software running on hyperscale cloud platforms.

Currently there are more than 750,000 users on SAP systems running on cloud platforms managed by LCP, according to the company.

LCP Migrate is a new premium service specifically for migrating SAP databases – even those with double- or triple-digit terabytes of data – to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure cloud platforms.

Migration projects sometimes include upgrading the version of SAP applications being used by a customer, according to Lemongrass. They may also include transitioning from underlying legacy operating systems such as HP/UX or AIX to a modern operating system running in the cloud, the company said, or from older database systems such as the Oracle Database or IBM DB2 to SAP HANA.

Along with standard SAP migration tools and capabilities, LCP Migrate incorporates migration technology and practices that Lemongrass has previously used with a limited number of customers but is now offering in a more structured package.

LCP Migrate also includes a browser-based interface for Migrate Workbench with Ansible automation workflow, providing customers with a dashboard for managing and analyzing the migration process.

But the key aspect of LCP Migrate is its ability to perform both homogenous and heterogeneous migrations of very large databases with minimal disruption and near zero downtime.

Core to the offering is Lemongrass’ Minimum Downtime Operations (MDO) service that reduces planned downtime and associated costs of cloud migrations while improving the security posture, performance and agility of mission-critical workloads, according to the company.

Rosenbloom said system downtime results in lost production and increased costs and that LCP Migrate can reduce technical downtimes in migrations by up to 98 percent. He said Lemongrass recently demonstrated a migration project for an Australian retailer with a 38-terabyte database that could be done in 12 hours instead of the standard 80 hours.