Dive Brief:
- Kyndryl rolled out consulting services aimed at easing data migrations for customers adopting SAP S/4HANA cloud-based ERP Tuesday. The Kyndryl Data Transformation Suite for SAP Solutions emerged from the company’s recently completed 18-month ERP migration, according to the announcement.
- Kyndryl began its ERP modernization in 2023 through the RISE with SAP program. Last summer, the company expanded an SAP alliance to guide enterprises to cloud ERP. The IT services provider created an application migration blueprint for enterprises moving to S/4HANA from SAP ERP Central Component legacy systems in 2023 as well.
- “This isn’t a one-size-fits-all plan,” said Michael Bradshaw, Kyndryl SVP and global practice leader for applications, data and AI. “We use the term ‘living in the platform,’ because the challenge for teams is understanding what are the real capabilities you get when you’re in the platform.”
Dive Insight:
Kyndryl’s ERP migration was part of a broader modernization push that kicked off when IBM completed its spinoff of the infrastructure services business in 2021. Bradshaw, who was then Kyndryl’s CIO, had two years to decouple the new company’s IT stack from IBM’s legacy systems.
The transformation journey also coincided with a major shift in SAP’s business, as the company encouraged on-prem customers to shift to cloud-based ERP ahead of a plan to sunset ECC support in 2027. In January, the company extended business continuity services until 2033 for customers who commit to the RISE with SAP package.
Kyndryl’s SAP practice is based on lessons learned from its migration. “The story we’re in right now is the ongoing journey,” Bradshaw said. “We intentionally constrained implementing additional things as the business started to figure out which of the old processes we still needed, now that we have the capabilities of the new system.”
To pull customers along the migration path, SAP added generative AI capabilities to the ERP package in 2023. The company trained the Joule copilot to assist in ERP migrations and embedded the tool across its Ariba supply chain management software suite and its business analytics platform last year. In February, SAP souped up Joule by adding agentic automation to its capabilities.
Kyndryl focused on cleaning up its data estate on the road to AI adoption. The company’s finance team went through more than 50 iterations of its ledger in order to streamline accounting data, Bradshaw said.
“What companies need to do right now is build a foundation of data in order to be able to take advantage of whatever AI capabilities they want to leverage, whether it’s through SAP, Microsoft or a custom LLM,” said Bradshaw. “A lot of AI POCs don’t go further than the POC because they’re not in an environment that is allowing them to scale.”
