Infosys generates substantial income from the deployment of SAP’s enterprise resource planning and other applications for the German company’s customers.
Infosys said that SAP’s 2022 deadline for most of its clients to move activities to the cloud was “ambitious.”
The second largest Indian IT service provider receives a significant portion of sales from the implementation of SAP business resource planning and other applications for the German company’s customers.
A few years ago, SAP set a deadline of the end of 2022 for transferring ERP solutions from on-site servers to the cloud. “This shift from SAP or any ERP provider to the cloud is very strategic, but it is also complicated, and these journeys are usually multi-year. As SAP claims it will end by 2022—it’s possibly very premature, and in fact I think that by this time most businesses will have begun migration and are in the middle of their path,” said Infosys Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao on an analyst’s call last week.
SAP Chief Financial Officer Luka Mucic said during a third-quarter conference calls in October that he was aiming to “accelerate” and complete much of the cloud movement by the end of 2022.
“We have already taken much of the necessary steps to modernise our cloud distribution. The last remaining step now is to shift the portion of our cloud user base that is now operating on our legacy cloud distribution systems to either our internal converging cloud or hyperscalers… And we are now preparing to intensify this step and complete much of the lift by the end of 2022,” said Mucic.
Rao of Infosys said that system integrators (SIs) had a critical part to play in such cloud migration activities. “In fact, SAP has extended support for its core on-site network until 2027. So, I think there’s a long time and the SIs have a big role to play in this migration as well—not just in terms of product collection, helping in the roadmap, but they have a role to play in migration, they have a role to play in integration and we understand the landscape,” he added.
However, Infosys does not anticipate any effect on business as a result of this migration, the Indian firm said.
Scholars claim that most businesses will find it difficult to reach this deadline.
There is no feasible way for most organisations to get close to this deadline, said HfS Research founder Phil Fersht. “We simply have so many other urgent IT goals. Providers like Infosys, Cognizant, etc., would have to move aggressively to plan consumers far in advance, as long delays are very possible,” said Fersht.
