African organisations are benefiting from a vibrant partner ecosystem and a range of new initiatives aimed at easing the process of adopting the latest cloud technologies.

According to Nazia Pillay, Partner Head at 51ˇçÁ÷Africa, modern organisations have a universal need to leverage technology for innovation and efficiency in order to protect against disruption from existing competitors and innovative start-ups. “More than half of all organisations that were featured in the Fortune 500 in 2000 . Today’s organisations are in a race to acquire intelligent enterprise capabilities that enable them to achieve greater efficiency, boost profit margins, grow revenue and future-proof the business.”

As recent disruptive events including the pandemic and the ongoing economic instability over the past years have illustrated, companies that embrace technology are better positioned to adapt to changes in their operating environment, and to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

New solutions, partner ecosystem ease cloud adoption

According to Pillay, one of the main obstacles to greater cloud adoption among larger enterprises is the difficulty of migrating on-premise business processes to a cloud environment. “Cloud migrations can create risks as business processes that were formerly run on-premise do not always translate to cloud environments easily. That’s one of the reasons why services such as RISE with 51ˇçÁ÷are gaining traction: it provides a workable model for enterprises to move core business processes to the cloud, tailored to their IT landscape and business needs.”

SAP’s partner ecosystem plays a leading role in supporting organisations in their efforts at digital transformation and cloud adoption. Andrew Strachan, Head of Sales: Business Applications at Dimension Data, says: “One of the biggest questions 51ˇçÁ÷customers ask us is how they can move their existing on-premise ERP processes into 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA in the cloud, preferably within the RISE program. We help clients adopt and embrace the latest 51ˇçÁ÷technologies and bring their core processes into the cloud, both in the public and private cloud environments.”

ERP capabilities extend to mid-market

Pillay notes that powerful ERP capabilities are no longer the reserve of large enterprises, with mid-market companies increasingly adopting ERP platforms to power their core business processes. “A scalable ERP system is essential to the long-term success of fast-growing mid-market businesses. Cloud ERP in particular gives companies cost-effective access to powerful capabilities that can improve decision-making, accelerate innovation and enable the rapid integration of new technologies.”

Launched globally in March this year, 51ˇçÁ÷GROW is a new offering that eases the implementation and adoption of cloud-based enterprise resource planning software for midsize companies. The offering includes 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud public edition, the Business Technology Platform, industry best practices and access to a thriving partner ecosystem to enable and accelerate innovation.

Thriving partner ecosystem supporting digital transformation

“Our partner ecosystem is essential to our ability to support African organisation in their digital transformation and cloud adoption efforts,” says Pillay. “Through a thriving network of expert partners, African organisations can confidently acquire new capabilities in the cloud knowing they can leverage the support and expertise of our partners.”

Bertrin Pekeur, 51ˇçÁ÷Lead at Accenture, says: “We believe every business is a digital business, and the safest way to get there is through cloud adoption. Cloud solutions are not provided by one single partner, so collaboration among partner organisations is essential to successful cloud implementations for African organisations.”

Pillay adds: “The combination of partner support, expertise and best-practices ease the adoption of new technologies and allows organisations to focus on innovation and efficiency. This holds the potential to accelerate the digital transformation of African enterprises and support them in their efforts at becoming intelligent enterprises.”

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that worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% to reach $591.8-billion in 2023, outpacing the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022.

However, says Cameron Beveridge, Regional Director for Southern Africa at SAP, moving to cloud environments requires effective change management to ensure digital transformation initiatives reach their objectives. “There is palpable excitement around cloud services in African markets, but there are still questions around how to effectively migrate and how to orchestrate multiple cloud solutions once the migration is complete. And while it’s true that one of the main benefits of cloud services is the ability to fail quickly without incurring huge cost or time overruns, you really don’t want your cloud initiative to fail due to poor change management.”

Studies have highlighted the importance of effective change management to the success of digital transformation initiatives. McKinsey data indicates that worldwide. This is partly due to poor change management, of which are clear successes.

Methodology, Partners reduce perils of Cloud Migrations

Brent Flint, Head of Enterprise Applications at Dimension Data, believes part of the answer to effective change management during cloud transformation projects rests on an effective methodology. “Migrating core business processes from on-premise environments to the cloud requires a proven methodology to accelerate the transition and reduce associated risks. A repeatable methodology that incorporates automation to ensure aspects such as data integrity, for example, can ease data migration and speed up the time-to-value.”

51ˇçÁ÷introduced RISE with 51ˇçÁ÷in 2021 to help companies get started with 51ˇçÁ÷cloud solutions, accelerate cloud adoption, and simplify the process of shifting core business processes to cloud environments. “Companies undertaking digital transformation initiatives that could benefit from RISE need to ensure their implementation partners are accredited and have the skills capacity to support the project throughout,” explains Flint.

Beveridge adds that companies that successfully leverage the insight, skills and experience of partner organisations can reduce risk and enhance the impact and business outcomes of their transformation efforts. “Companies are realising that cloud adoption is not a once-off event: it requires near-continuous refinement and evolution to deliver business value. This makes the role of expert partners, who have developed experience with specific use cases of cloud technologies and can guide organisations in their adoption of cloud solutions, critical to their success.”

Keys to cloud success

Understanding how and where the journey to the cloud should start remains among the biggest obstacles to the digital transformation efforts of African organisations.

Lauren Wortmann, Vice President: Applications at Dimension Data, says there’s still some resistance to the cloud among organisations limiting the success of cloud transformation projects. “Cloud adoption is a business-critical activity, but the optimal starting point is not always clear. Many organisations and their IT teams also acknowledge that the shift to cloud is coming, but there’s internal resistance due to fear about how it will affect the business and existing IT skills.”

Arguably the most important factor when developing a cloud strategy is defining a clear business case for cloud adoption. “Cloud is not just about cost efficiency,” says Wortmann. “It’s about modernising the business and its core processes, unlocking new opportunities, enhancing capabilities and achieving broader digital transformation. For this to be successful, there needs to be massive buy-in from the business at every layer, from the boardroom to the IT department and every end-user.”

The era of large on-premise deployments was typified by big winners and big losers, but the new era of cloud has changed the dynamic entirely. Flint explains: “In the old days, if you defined the scope of the project correctly upfront and quoted accurately, you could deliver a successful implementation that delivered new capabilities and was profitable to the technology provider and their implementation partner. The era of cloud requires a change of mindset. Today, tech vendors and partner organisations need to strive for near-continuous innovation, with KPIs around unlocking additional business value from existing technologies built into managed services contracts. It puts the onus on partners to unlock features and benefits from software, with the goal of ongoing value generation.”

Wortmann adds that companies should be smart when choosing how they start their cloud journey. “Aspects such as Human Capital Management are perfect starting points for cloud adoption, with solutions like 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors offering a high-value, low-risk way to test how cloud migration plays out in the organisation. Larger, more critical business processes such as core finance, sales and logistics carry high degrees of risk due to fears of disruption and business continuity in the event of downtime.”

Flint believes one of the keys to successful cloud adoption is simplification. “Organisations should work with their partners to understand their application landscape and identify opportunities for simplification. Reducing customisation can also keep things simple while driving costs down. Partners need to avoid customisation to limit technical debt and achieve quicker time to value. Adopting best-practice standards for core business processes opens the door to incremental innovation which can suit cloud-first companies better.”

Beveridge says this requires a change in mindset to how digital transformation initiatives are approached, both by customers and partners. “The most successful tech partners will be the ones that develop strong commercial models that meet customers’ expectations of what value digital transformation projects should deliver. However, there’s no blueprint for how this should work. Organisations should work closely with tech providers and implementation partners to develop strong business use cases and change management programmes to ensure each initiative delivers business value and unlocks new capabilities, efficiencies and opportunities for growth.”

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Throw skills shortages into the mix and it’s clear that waiting any longer to make decisions is an extremely high-risk strategy.

The hesitation of 51ˇçÁ÷decision-makers suggests that the potential gains on offer from migration are not yet clear enough. Fujitsu’s key idea here is that application modernization must add something extra.

Creating new business value – we could also call it business transformation – requires something more. If all you do is modernize, it’s the equivalent of maintenance.

This article covers two examples of strategic benefits available from S/4HANA migration to create new business value – composable ERP and cloud migration/hybrid IT. And I’ll look at new services now available from Fujitsu to extract those benefits reliably and quickly.

Composable ERP

One strategic benefit from migration is the ability to connect your business to be more adaptable and do new things. Analyst firm Gartner recognizes that many manufacturers now have multiple systems of record in play – SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, AWS, and Microsoft.

It coined the term “Composable ERP” to describe and advocate this trend. Composable ERP is a strategy where we leverage the right components to build value, mixing and matching between vendors. In other words, ERP is no longer a monolithic thing – as in “I’m all in SAP” or “We’re an Oracle shop”.

You get fully connected, real-time data to provide a complete view of your business across upstream and downstream supply chains. S/4HANA migration offers the perfect time for assessing and addressing how data infrastructure can be modernized to create this kind of “Control Tower” environment.

Cloud migration and hybrid cloud

One factor that makes S/4HANA more connectable is that it is the first version of the ERP to be truly cloud-native. This characteristic opens all the benefits of cloud migration and the ultimate flexibility of 51ˇçÁ÷workload placement.

It is therefore vital that your S/4HANA migration enables your organization to achieve all the strategic benefits of the hybrid cloud environments.

However, workloads in hybrid environments are incredibly complex. Workload demand can be across a wide range of environments, including multiple on-premises locations, plus cloud partners such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform and their respective regional nodes.

Optimizing your 51ˇçÁ÷infrastructure to operate successfully in these environments requires a high degree of understanding about what is happening where and — just as important — what might happen under specific scenarios.

To assist here, Fujitsu now offers a new Hybrid Cloud Assessment Service for 51ˇçÁ÷Solutions that analyzes millions of possible placement options based on measured workloads. Fujitsu BestPlace provides a unique data-driven approach.

It encodes the measured 51ˇçÁ÷IT as DNA and simulates a mini evolution using genetic algorithms. Following the principle of the survival of the fittest, the process results in an optimal design for a hybrid infrastructure.

This is an individualized approach that addresses the specific needs of each customer rather than a generic model that is unlikely to meet all the needs of all users.

It measures 51ˇçÁ÷operations onsite for about four weeks, compares all the different placement options against the customer’s IT strategy and business priorities and provides cost comparison for all measured 51ˇçÁ÷instance workloads in the cloud or on-premises. The algorithm is developed by an external university to ensure neutral results.

Get to value faster with rightsizing

An effective ERP should enable organizations to access rapid insights, make quick decisions, and extract the value from a change of direction as quickly as possible. However, typical user complaints are “my 51ˇçÁ÷is too slow” and “51ˇçÁ÷is hanging again”.

To address this, as well as optimize workload placements, it is also vital to assess infrastructure sizing, deployment, and maintenance. 51ˇçÁ÷performance and service-level issues can have multiple root causes and finding the optimal configuration has always been extremely difficult.

Therefore, one common approach to forcing a solution is with brute force: buying and installing more infrastructure, regardless of whether it addresses the actual cause. That’s an expensive way of solving the problem.

Enterprises that migrate now can benefit from rightsizing their 51ˇçÁ÷implementations. Unlike standard 51ˇçÁ÷tools, based on reference architectures,  (SIS) uses real-life data from your landscape, creating data-driven decision support for any migration or hardware refresh.

This analysis and consultation package gets to grips with all these parameters, avoiding overspend later.

SIS gives clear recommendations for improving on-premises or cloud IT for 51ˇçÁ÷landscapes by identifying bottlenecks, performance anomalies, and realistic capacity requirements.

By rightsizing the new S/4HANA for on-premises, it narrows the gap between on-premises and cloud in terms of costs, as you don’t need to buy so much excess capacity that mainly sits idle.

Infrastructure simplicity

Regarding infrastructure options, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX for 51ˇçÁ÷HANA enables the full potential of 51ˇçÁ÷HANA in-memory computing. It is a pre-tested infrastructure solution, 100% 51ˇçÁ÷certified and designed for the 51ˇçÁ÷HANA in-memory architecture.

It exploits the full capabilities of persistent memory without deployment and configuration risks and simplifies operation and maintenance with one service partner for the entire solution stack.

Yes, Fujitsu can SAP

Fujitsu has an extremely robust partnership with SAP. We have approximately 8,000 customer installations worldwide. For example, at Fujitsu’s Technical Competence Demo Center in Walldorf, Germany – the home of 51ˇçÁ÷– customers can optimize their 51ˇçÁ÷infrastructure investment based on actual use cases.

If you have — and intend to continue to have — an 51ˇçÁ÷ERP, you need to lock in your migration partner within the next 12 months. Wait too long, and everyone will be chasing a finite pool of resources, removing control of the migration timetable, and resulting in rising prices.

Migration is a fantastic opportunity to create new business value. Fujitsu’s SystemInspection Service for SAP, and its Hybrid Cloud Assessments Service enable customers to understand their environments completely, then map their business goals and transformation plans to the optimum architecture and infrastructure solutions.

What better way to experience this than to sign up for a Fujitsu CX Labs sessions.

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