Sergey Tarasov - stock.adobe.com
Lemongrass taking advantage of SAP cloud moves
Vendor’s encouragement to customers to adopt its Rise technology has opened up opportunities for its channel
SAP’s move towards the cloud has benefitted channel partners that are able to support the vendor’s offerings and add value and services.
One of those that has seen the shift to cloud accelerate over the past 18 months is Lemongrass, which specialises in helping customers migrate, with opportunities for those capable of supporting digital transformation continuing to emerge.
Lemongrass co-founder and chief technology officer Eamonn O’Neill said SAP’s Rise cloud offering has made a difference, and opened up fresh avenues for partners to support customers.
“What we will be doing over the next few years is accelerating that,” he said. “One of the things that we’ve noticed, for example, supporting SAP enterprise customers globally, is that [only a fraction] have migrated to cloud data, infrastructure as a service. Pretty much all of those customers will also need to migrate to Rise at some point in the next four or five years.
“What’s happened is SAP have created an offering where it’s going to generate a massive demand for migrations into their platform and for services that can work around this new offering they have. So, for us, it’s really exciting. This is exactly what we’re set up to do to try and respond to new developments in the space for SAP customers, and try to take advantage of those on behalf of customers.”
O’Neill added that Rise provoked fresh pre- and post-service opportunities for partners that were positioned to take advantage of them.
“For example, in the pre and the migration, we’ve got advisory services, which help customers map it all out, then you’ve got the actual lift and shift of the systems that change,” he said. “In the post-migrate scenario, again, SAP will look after a lot of the infrastructure management, but what we do on top of that is what we call ‘RISE Wrapper’. It’s like a thin layer of technical services.”
Flexibility and customisation
Customers were often looking for more flexibility and customisation, and that again played into the hands of those SAP partners with the expertise to meet that demand. “They want to see a little bit of variability,” said O’Neill. “They want to translate from what they wanted to what this service will understand.”
SAP partners need to cover all the bases, with customers moving to Rise at various speeds, with a need to continue to support on-premise options.
“Where we start the customer conversation is, ‘Do you know what you want to do yet? And if you do, we’ll follow you,’” he said. “But part of the reason we launched some advisory services earlier this year was specifically to help customers navigate some of the factors involved in making that decision.
“There’s definitely a little bit of work up-front to help people get their head around the pros and cons of each of these options, and how to calculate for their business the right thing to do,” said O’Neill. “It has to be customer-led, but sometimes you can contribute to that conversation with some data that we’re seeing elsewhere.”
He said Rise was a chance for SAP partners to pitch cloud and additional migration services, but that the channel needed to get into a position to take advantage of the situation.
“This is going to be a massive revenue opportunity for a company like Lemongrass, but the key thing is you’ve got to be willing to change,” said O’Neill.
“We’re still going to have the same people busy doing what they’re doing today,” he continued. “This is additional creative stuff that we’re seeing, but we know how to execute that, and we can bring a lot of the lessons we’ve learned so far to that area. But there’s no doubt you know, when you get a behemoth like SAP, they’re making a market here. That’s the thing that hyperscalers did: 10 years ago, they made a market that needed people like Lemongrass and others who could step into that as a partner, and be agile, and learn and try to bring those learnings and ways of working to customers.”
