Migrating to SAP S/4HANA: Migration deadlines and how Red Hat technologies can help

Digitalizing key business processes can be mission critical. But for many businesses, the pandemic slowed progress on key digital transformation initiatives. If your business depends on traditional SAP environments, delays are particularly problematic given the 2027 deadline for migration to SAP HANA or SAP S/4HANA.

Red Hat can help by providing a portfolio of solutions that reduce the complexity of migration, make your data center more efficient, simplify hybrid IT, power the intelligent edge, and allow you to generate new business value.

The impact of COVID-19 on SAP S/4HANA migration plans

According to an SAPinsider 2021 survey sponsored in part by Red Hat, COVID-19 had the biggest impact on SAP users’ plans for SAP S/4HANA. Of the 169 community members surveyed, 49% said that their plans were significantly impacted. But almost as many (48%) reported that their plans had not changed. 

As the majority (62%) of those whose deployment plans for SAP S/4HANA were most impacted were either building their business case (38%) or formulating their plans for SAP S/4HANA (24%), it’s clear that fewer of these respondents move to the next stage in their transition: running proof of concepts or implementing. The majority of those whose plans were not impacted (57%) by COVID-19 were either in the process of implementing or were already running SAP S/4HANA.

So how can you simplify and accelerate your current and future digital transformation initiatives? The answer is by investing in a scalable, flexible and intelligent infrastructure that sets you up for a future of innovation as a digital enterprise running SAP solutions. 

Accelerate your next digital transformation with Red Hat

Since becoming supported by SAP more than 20 years ago, Red Hat has worked with SAP and its customers to champion innovation in the enterprise datacenter and beyond. Red Hat offers a complete and open infrastructure for SAP workloads, and can serve as the ideal foundation for (and tooling of) the hybrid cloud irrespective of where customers are in their journey. The Red Hat portfolio eases the complexity of migration and lays a solid foundation for your best future by:

• Making your datacenter efficient.

• Making hybrid IT simple.

• Powering the intelligent edge of the network.

• Enabling new business insights from big data.

For example, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides the capabilities to help speed your migration to SAP S/4HANA and reduce associated migration downtime. It enables you to migrate to SAP S/4HANA today and then adopt and expand automation throughout your IT and SAP environment at your own pace. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help your organization deploy new server resources and new storage faster, and speed resource configuration. By automating migration tasks with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you can also increase the reliability and consistency of your SAP environment.

Tools you need to succeed now – and in the future

In addition to the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we provide a full portfolio of solutions to jump-start and accelerate your SAP-enabled digital transformations, including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, which is SAP certified for integration with SAP S/4HANA. It provides a robust and highly available foundation to ensure uptime and availability of business-critical systems like SAP. Features like Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA solutions for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA, Live Kernel Patching, and in-place upgrades enable you to achieve near-zero-downtime SAP production deployments.

• Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Insights provide management, proactive monitoring, and automated remediation out of the box for your SAP digital core, making hybrid IT simple. Included as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP solutions subscription, they ensure your IT landscape on Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs efficiently and securely, stays compliant with various standards, and uses predictive analytics to avoid errors and downtime.

• Red Hat Integration supports agile integration with the digital core, which enables your custom applications and data and supports new ways to extend the functionality of your SAP applications.

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps you efficiently develop, build, and deploy end-to-end business processes across your hybrid cloud and scale them automatically. In addition to providing agility, scalability, and portability across hybrid cloud, resulting in lower IT operation costs, it eliminates manual tasks for developers or data scientists around claiming storage for their workloads, as storage is provisioned and managed automatically.

• Red Hat Fuse offers a powerful foundation for building "edge-native" services.

• Red Hat Decision Manager enables edge computing by executing against streaming (internet of things) IoT data using relevant business rules on the gateway. It can also sort through the “noise” from unnecessary messages received from devices and reduce traffic passed to SAP Data Intelligence for further artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) processing.

Want to learn more?

Red Hat can help on every stage of your journey in becoming an intelligent enterprise. To learn more, visit the Red Hat booth (Reduce Migration Downtime with Red Hat’s Portfolio for SAP Workloads - IT605) at SAPPHIRE NOW to speak with our open source experts and learn more about our strategic alliance with SAP.