|
HP Rolls Out SAP Upgrade Services Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox
Posted on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 5:20:00 PM |
IT services giant Hewlett-Packard Co. today rolled out a series of new and upgraded services intended to help break the logjam of organizations that have not yet found a compelling reason to upgrade to the latest release of SAP's enterprise applications suite.
The new service offerings include Upgrade Services for SAP ERP 6.0, as well as what HP calls an Upgrade Factory for SAP Applications, a delivery model focused on accelerating manufacturers' ability to migrate to ERP 6.0, the latest release of the SAP suite.
HP also announced plans to expand its SAP application outsourcing business.
"Many customers are still on older versions of SAP applications," Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president for the applications practice in HP's consulting and integration business, told Managing Automation. "Although SAP has offered strong incentives to get people to upgrade, many still need to move from current versions to the new version."
In fact, according to studies by Forrester Research, only about 2,200 companies out of the estimated installed base of 30,000 SAP R/3 users have upgraded to ERP 6.0. Another 10% plan to upgrade, said Ray Wang, a Forrester analyst. Many of those remaining on older versions of R/3 invested a lot of time and money in upgrading within the past two years to versions 4.6 and 4.7 of that release, Wang noted.
"Many are saying they don't want to go through the expense of the upgrade process again," he told Managing Automation. "Right now there's a lot of pressure for them not to do the upgrade for that reason."
SAP's decision to require customers to relicense applications in order to upgrade to ERP 6.0 is also presenting a barrier, Wang said.
Wang noted that SAP has begun to address the issue by providing new ERP functionality on a more incremental basis through enhancement packages in areas such as HR talent management and order-to-cash process improvement. In order to take advantage of those incremental enhancement packages, however, SAP customers need to have upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0.
"In some sense, the move to 6.0 is the last big-bang upgrade that customers will face," he said.
HP's new service offerings are intended to help manufacturers make that leap. The new HP Upgrade Services for SAP ERP 6.0 support organizations that intend to make technical, functional, or strategic SAP ERP upgrades. Strategic upgrades, for example, include organizations that want to significantly reengineer processes as part of the SAP ERP 6.0 upgrade.
The new offering is based on what HP calls the HP Upgrade Factory for SAP Applications, a collection of consistent processes, best practices, methodologies, tools, and templates that can be used to accelerate SAP ERP 6.0 upgrades.
HP also announced that it plans to significantly expand its Outsourcing for SAP Applications offering. The company is expanding the size of the data centers through which it offers SAP application outsourcing, said Pat Adamiak, vice president for partner marketing and alliances. HP has been offering SAP application outsourcing on a pilot basis, he said. So far, the company has just over 100 SAP outsourcing customers, he said. The company plans to offer SAP application outsourcing services through 12 data centers distributed globally.
"We will aggressively focus on EMEA, the U.S., and Canada," Adamiak said.
Today's announcement follows a similar announcement earlier in the year, in which HP unveiled a collection of system management tools and services that are geared toward helping SAP users test and monitor their enterprise systems.
|
|
|
|
|