Zeiss Revamps SAP Cloud Migration Strategy After Projected Costs Hit 200 Million Euros
Zeiss has completely restructured its SAP cloud migration project after costs ballooned to an estimated 200 million euros. The company abandoned its large-scale infrastructure-heavy lift-and-shift approach, which had exceeded both budget and schedule constraints. Instead, Zeiss is adopting a gradual, data-driven strategy to mitigate the high risks and complexities inherent in monolithic ERP cloud migrations.
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| Aspect | Before / Alternative | After / This |
|---|---|---|
| Migration Strategy | Centralized lift-and-shift of physical data and infrastructure | Decentralized virtual integration focusing on a semantic data layer |
| Data Architecture | Direct migration of entire databases to the cloud | Data federation connecting on-premises assets and cloud systems |
| Operational Focus | Completing physical infrastructure transition | Prioritizing data semantics and governance for AI and analytics |
| Governance Ownership | Relied heavily on standard monolithic SAP ERP capabilities | Internal management of custom semantic definition layers |
Action Checklist
- Evaluate total cost projections of current ERP cloud migrations to prevent infrastructure cost overruns. Look beyond licensing to find hidden data transfer and integration costs.
- Assess feasibility of a semantic data layer to decouple business logic from underlying physical storage. This allows AI and analytics tools to query data without waiting for complete database migrations.
- Implement data federation to bridge on-premises legacy SAP instances with new cloud resources. This avoids high-risk 'big bang' migrations.
- Establish strong in-house governance processes for managing the new semantic definitions. Decentralization shifts the governance burden from standard ERP tools to the internal development team.
Source: Semantic Data Layer Watch
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