May 26: Agentic AI Platform for SAP
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The reality in the data centers and IT departments of existing SAP customers often resembles an archaeological excavation site in which a massive network of technical legacies has accumulated over decades. In the golden era of the R/3 and ECC 6.0 systems, the Abap programming language gave companies unlimited architectural freedom, allowing them to dig deep into the standard code of the SAP ERP software and adapt the system precisely to their individual business processes using Z programs, modifications and highly specific in-house developments.
What was celebrated by CCC managers, CIOs and board members as a competitive advantage to stand out in the global market has turned into a leaden and toxic legacy in the face of the unstoppable digital transformation and the approaching end of maintenance for old SAP systems. These historically grown SAP monoliths are interspersed with millions of lines of customer-specific code, up to eighty percent of which is no longer used in day-to-day operations, but still causes immense maintenance costs, jeopardizes system stability and poses serious security risks. The mandatory switch to the new, in-memory-based ERP generation SAP S/4 Hana and the associated strategic direction towards the cloud now require a radical paradigm shift that presents IT managers with financial, technical and organizational challenges. In this tense market environment, the software group SAP has proclaimed a new development doctrine that dominates the entire market under the term „Clean Core“ and is forcing customers to fundamentally rethink their IT architectures that have evolved over decades.
„SAP landscapes are never finished,“ explains Professor Alexander Zeier, co-inventor of the SAP Hana database and co-founder of Nova Intelligence. Regulatory requirements, new business models, functional enhancements, release changes - the question of how to keep custom code clean, maintainable and close to the standard does not arise once, it arises continuously, every quarter, for years. „Nova is designed precisely for this life cycle: as a permanent platform for analysis, documentation, fit-to-standard assessment, clean core governance, new development and continuous optimization,“ emphasizes Zeier and says: „If you only use Nova for migration, you only use a fraction of it - the platform accompanies custom code from analysis to modernization to new development. This is also reflected in our PAC ROI calculations. In the pure migration scenario and with the continuous further development of the S/4 environment, we can already demonstrate ROI values. If you combine both scenarios, you get ROI values of around 1400 percent in an exemplary deployment scenario with around 100,000 custom code objects. This is not a project ROI. This is a structural, long-term economic advantage.“
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