Migration to S/4 HANA and GDPR lead to a significant increase in demand
Kreuzlingen, 11 July 2018 – Current topics on the CIO agenda such as migration to S/4 HANA and the stringent European data protection allow the demand for solutions to decommission legacy applications to grow rapidly and sustainably. In the coming years, 10’000 existing SAP customers in Germany alone could benefit from the resulting advantages such as massive reductions in operating costs, legal certainty and faster completion of the digital transformation. The associated market potential is extremely interesting for system and consulting companies in the SAP environment. In order to tap this potential, Swiss Data Migration Services AG, specialist for the decommissioning of legacy systems, has fundamentally revised its channel program and aims to gain numerous new partners.
“Based on a conservative estimate, we anticipate a market potential of two billion euros for us and our partners over the next ten years,” explains Thomas Failer, founder and Chairman of the Board of Data Migration Services AG. “As a medium-sized provider, we can only develop this potential together with new partners. System houses in Germany focusing on S/4-HANA migration in the coming years are therefore very welcome. Size is not the decisive factor. Access to existing SAP customers from a wide variety of industries is much more important. Around 1’000 of them will switch to S/4 HANA every year in Germany alone and will need a suitable solution, which we can offer them, as well as sound consultation from our partners”.
30 to 40 new partners in Germany
To date, Data Migration Services AG has focused primarily on large international consulting firms such as T-Systems as partners. Due to the high demand for solutions for decommissioning legacy systems, especially in the SAP environment, the Swiss company is also opening its partner program for local partners and for those with specific industry know-how.
The new Data Migration Services AG partner program now has four partner categories:
- Value added resellers covering the entire value chain from customer acquisition to implementation, training and service
- Implementation partners who will implement the project after contract conclusion
- So-called “referral partners” who broker projects and mandates
- Technology partners who, among other things, provide cloud resources for the operation of the solution
“We are planning to gain 30 to 40 new partners in Germany alone over the next two to five years in order to be able to cover the market,” emphasises Tobias Eberle, CEO of Data Migration Services AG and responsible for the partner business. “The new partners will benefit from interesting margins, we will help them to build up the necessary technical and product-specific know-how and provide marketing and sales support”.
Data Migration Services AG is based in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, since its foundation in 1996 and operates worldwide. Its customer base includes well-known companies such as ABB, ABInBev, ALSTOM, Lafarge Holcim, Mercedes, General Electric and, in Germany, Commerzbank and Deutsche Telekom.
JiVS: The platform for data management and legal security
The modernisation of the IT landscapes in companies will require massive investments in new software generations such as S/4 HANA in the coming years. At the same time, IT budgets cannot grow to the required extent. As a result, companies are forced to shift their expenses from maintenance and operation to investment in innovation. While the ratio of operating expenses to investments is generally 80 to 20, it would have to move towards 60 to 40 to lead the digital transformation to success.
Appropriate steps to achieve this goal are the decommissioning of legacy systems and the system-independent and legally compliant management of data, including business logic. Data Migration Services AG has developed the JiVS solution exactly for this purpose. The Java-based platform excels in retaining data from decommissioned legacy systems as well as the associated documents in their business context. “This is what we call historicisation (aka. application retirement), which is different from mere archiving. Thanks to application retirement, business users have the opportunity to trace the creation of data and documents as well as their further processing along the value chain. In addition, legacy data and documents can still be used in everyday business and for analysis purposes, regardless of their original application,” explains Thomas Failer.
For existing SAP customers who intend to migrate to S/4 HANA, the advantages of JiVS are decisive. The funds freed up as a result of up to 80 percent lower operating costs can be invested in the new software generation from Walldorf. At the same time, they only have to transfer part of the existing data to the new platform, which can be cleaned up during the migration thanks to JiVS and thus improve its quality.
JiVS also demonstrates its advantages for companies in terms of legal certainty, in particular with regard to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition to preventing unauthorised access, the regulation also specifies the deletion of data. This is exactly what JiVS Retention Management provides, allowing information to be removed at the level of the individual data records. In addition, data can be selectively hidden on the basis of rules at field level so that unauthorised individuals cannot view it. This is important not only in the context of the GDPR, but also during revisions or audits by both internal and external auditors.