Deutsche Telekom calls on SAP for Rise all-in-one offer

SAP has won another convert to its Rise with SAP managed software offering. Deutsche Telekom intends to migrate systems used by its European operating companies to Rise over the next two years.

It’s following in the footsteps of IBM and Microsoft, which like the German telco have an edge over regular companies contemplating a similar move to Rise in that they have their own clouds in which to host the applications and their own IT services divisions to make the move. IBM said it would move to Rise in May 2022 while Microsoft gave a progress report on its own Rise migration in March that year.

Self-service

In Deutsche Telekom’s case its IT services subsidiary, T-Systems, is an SAP premium supplier for Rise and operates its own private cloud, Future Cloud Infrastructure (FCI), in which to host its parent’s applications.

Deutsche Telekom operates in 50 countries and has more than 250 million mobile customers around the world, including those of US wireless operator T-Mobile, of which it is the majority shareholder.

It’s already five years since the company embarked on its ERP modernization journey. It began the process of standardizing 11 of its 55 ERP systems on SAP S/4HANA in 2019.

Back then, the telco’s CIO said the move would enable the company to create better predictive planning models that would in turn speed up the rollout of 5G networks or ensure customers receive the equipment they order more quickly.

For the move to Rise, T-Systems will migrate, consolidate, and manage more than 300 Deutsche Telekom systems in its FCI private cloud environment or in public clouds, representing a major part of the company’s ERP landscape, according to an SAP representative.

Those systems are used by national operating companies in Germany and across the European Union. Some of them were originally developed and operated by Accenture, a Deutsche Telekom spokeswoman said via email.

Looming deadline

“Migration to Rise should be finished by 2026,” she wrote.

If things go to plan, then it will be in plenty of time to beat the 2027 deadline for SAP’s ending of mainstream support for of its legacy ERP platform, ECC.

That’s just as well because despite Deutsche Telekom’s previous work on standardization, not all the applications it is moving to Rise are currently running on S/4HANA. Some of them are still running on ECC 6.0, the company’s spokeswoman wrote.

In addition, the move also concerns systems running on SAP’s packaged data warehouse, BW/4HANA, she said, adding that all the applications to be moved to Rise are currently running in a Deutsche Telekom data center operated by T-Systems.

Despite the support from its T-Systems subsidiary, it’s possible Deutsche Telekom will see some disruption from the move.

According to Edyta Kosowska, IDC’s European program manager for enterprise applications, projects like this usually require not only technical modernization but also significant business process modernization, especially since SAP is encouraging Rise customers to migrate to a “clean core” in S/4HANA, with any necessary customizations rebuilt on its Business Technology Platform.

Moving to Rise is necessary for SAP customers wanting to access the full functionality of S/4HANA, Kosowska pointed out. “All the innovative features like generative AI or green ledger are in Rise, specifically the Premium Plus version. It’s a big incentive for customers to start the journey,” she said.

Deutsche Telekom may find the carbon emissions accounting functionality of SAP’s green ledger particularly useful as it closes in on its goal of climate neutrality in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025, and aims to become climate neutral across the full value chain (including Scope 3 emissions) by 2040.