Service Provider Lemongrass Expands Its Capabilities Around ‘Rise With SAP’ Cloud Migrations

With SAP’s deadline for ending support for legacy ERP applications fast approaching, Lemongrass is offering a new release of its cloud migration platform that’s capable of moving SAP ERP systems with triple-digit terabytes of data to the cloud with minimal disruption.

Lemongrass, a leading services and solutions provider in the SAP space, has expanded the capabilities of its Lemongrass Cloud Platform Migrate to support migrations and upgrades to ‘Rise with SAP’ cloud ERP applications.

The updated platform is capable of migrating SAP databases with 150 TBs or more of data with limited downtime, according to the Atlanta-based solution provider, and now incorporates trained AI to compress migration time.

The new Lemongrass offering comes as SAP continues to urge customers to adopt S/4HANA cloud editions of SAP software and move off older on-premises systems – especially with the vendor holding firm to its plans to end support for Business Suite 7/ECC6.0 legacy ERP applications at the end of 2027. (Extended maintenance to 2030 will be available for an additional fee.)

While migrating off the older software to on-premises S/4HANA is an option, many businesses and organizations are choosing to migrate to the cloud. SAP has made it clear that it is prioritizing cloud-first development for new features and many new innovations and advanced capabilities – including around AI – will primarily be in its cloud offerings.

“The 2027 date is definitely something that's driving the pace of this,” said Lemongrass CTO Eamon O’Neill (pictured) in an interview with CRN, discussing the demand for Rise with SAP and Lemongrass’s own services. “And I think SAP is being fairly clear that they're not intending to move that date, even though there's a lot of customers that still have to complete that S/4HANA journey.”

Rise with SAP, which debuted in January 2021, bundles the software company’s cloud-based S/4HANA enterprise resource planning applications with migration tools and methodologies, consulting services and infrastructure management for migrating on-premises SAP software to cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Earlier this year, to boost demand, SAP launched the Rise with SAP Migration and Modernization program with additional resources, services and financial incentives.

O’Neill said a key driver of SAP application migrations is the desire to adopt a “clean core” of ERP functionality minus legacy custom code modifications and extensions – many of which are no longer used – to improve system agility and simplify system upgrades.

“A lot of these changes [modifications and extensions] have been very useful for customers, but a lot of them are not even used anymore. SAP estimates that 65 percent of all custom code is never actually executed anymore,” O’Neill said. “But more than that, more than just tidying up those legacy artifacts, [customers are] also trying to refactor into a more modern microservices approach, rather than embedded code.”

Going forward, customizations and extensions will run on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), a platform-as-a-service that supports SAP applications, rather than be embedded within the core applications, the CTO said.

“The benefit of that is, SAP will be able to release updates, functional updates, and feature improvements at a much faster clip for those customers,” O’Neill said. “Some people think that Rise [with SAP] is just about migrating into an SAP-hosted [cloud] tenant. But there's a much more profound goal with Rise, which is about getting customers to a much more agile platform where they can adopt innovation faster. That’s something that customers are only starting to understand.”

And building AI capabilities into SAP applications is also a big part of this, he said.

“Every move, every kind of project, every internal release, should be moving towards that goal. The imperative here is all about getting business AI embedded into your ERP system,” O’Neill said. “SAP has announced, pretty loudly and repeatedly, that they want to dramatically increase the amount of AI features that are going to be embedded into the product. But they're also saying that can only really be done if you're on clean core. So there is a business imperative to get there.”

Helping clients understand this has been a focus of Lemongrass with its consulting services and Lemongrass Cloud Platform Migrate, an extension of the company’s Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) with governance, monitoring and automation capabilities for optimizing SAP applications and workloads. LCP Migrate initially launched in mid-2023.

“We're spending a good bit of our time helping customers understand what this means for them, through our advisory practice, and helping them plot out a roadmap on how they're going to get there,” O’Neill said. “Once they really see what this is all about, it certainly becomes a lot more compelling for them to do this work.”

The latest release of LCP Migrate, part of the service provider’s premium service offerings, is capable of automating many aspects of migrating large-scale SAP systems. It can now migrate databases that underlie SAP applications that range from 10 TBs to more than 150 TBs – all with limited downtime, according to Lemongrass.

The LCP Migrate update, which is currently available, includes a new browser-based interface for Migrate Workbench with Ansible automation workflow, “allowing customers to create, manage, and analyze their migration process from start to finish,” according to the company announcement.

The platform also leverages Lemongrass’s trained AI to compress the overall project timeframe, the company said, and LCP Migrate tools and processes have been updated to match the latest changes in Rise with SAP.

“ SAP is committed to driving optimal customer experiences,” said Karl Fahrbach, SAP’s chief partner officer, in a statement. “LCP Migrate highlights how our partner ecosystem makes this a reality – through innovative offerings that cut migration time and get our customers with complex systems running on RISE with SAP as quickly as possible.”

In addition to its partnership with SAP, Lemongrass maintains close ties with the cloud hyperscalers. Last week the company was awarded a 2024 Geography and Global Partner Award by AWS, specifically the cloud giant’s Industry Partner of the Year – Consumer Goods award, which recognizes top AWS Partners within the AWS Consumer Goods Competency. The award is given to partners who deliver modern industry technology solutions and expert consulting services for an end-to-end transformation of consumer goods companies' operating models across six solution areas: marketing, supply chain, manufacturing, product development, unified commerce, and IT & digital transformation.