As an SAP solution, we do more than preach digital transformation, we also walk the walk. What choice do we have? The imperative of the digital economy to use data to deliver better customer experiences applies to us as much as it does to our customers.

For the past several years, SAP has been pursuing its own digital transformation—moving to the cloud, changing business models, and adopting intelligent technologies to get the most out of our data. A critical part of this journey has been to move our cloud offerings off legacy databases and onto the SAP HANA platform, a project that is now complete for the majority of our cloud line-of-business (LoB) solution portfolios. This paper explores the transformation stories of the organizational units that support these solutions. These units, including the teams supporting SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Customer Experience solutions, faced two common challenges.

The first challenge focused on adapting each solution to take full advantage of the architecture of SAP HANA. Applications and solutions were reengineered to exploit its ability to bring together transactions and analytics on a single instance of the data, thus enabling real-time business insight.

The second challenge related to the downtime window for migrating customer data. To minimize this downtime, SAP developed migration technology to automate data conversion and accelerate the migration process.