Empowering SAP ECC Customers with a Data Intelligence Cloud for AI

To say that there is confusion, fear and a general feeling of mistrust for those companies that have made large investments in SAP ECC over the last couple of decades is an understatement. With numerous announcements on end of support, bridging product announcements and new version migrations offers, it is no wonder the average CIO may be questioning early investments in proprietary technology that require a high cost of implementation and ownership, vendor lock-in, limited customization options, dependence on SAP support, potential complexity in managing the system, and difficulty integrating with other non-SAP software.

This challenge is compounded by ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) announcements and industry analyst CIO surveys showing that “ it is all about AI” and AI will provide the most significant impact on their industries over the next 3 years. What is need is the best of both worlds: protecting existing investments in infrastructure while enabling fast adoption of new technologies in order to realize the competitive gains.

To Migrate to S/4HANA, an Alternative or Some Combination

Evey CIO fears the announcement of end of support and ultimately end of life of a significant technology investment, but these are an unfortunate fact of life. The announcement of SAP ECC’s end of support was met with the expected market responses and prompted SAP to provide a bridging strategy for those customers not able to readily migrate to the successor S/4HANA offering.

To compound the challenge, SAP S/4HANA has not been licensed by two-thirds (69 percent) of ERP Central Component (ECC) clients. So this begs the question of how to either make the migration easier, find a way to extend ECC’s useful life or evaluate alternatives or some combination of the above.

Ultimately it will be a delicate balance to satisfy business requirements with the technology infrastructure that can accommodate ongoing rapid changes.

Seamless SAP Modernization with a Data Intelligence Cloud for AI

The most effective means to satisfy business requirements, SAP migration concerns and AI adoption is to implement a data intelligence cloud for AI. Specifically, a unified platform that eliminates silos and integrates with existing infrastructure and 3rd party data, combining business and IT to remain secure and competitive.

This will allow SAP customers across all industries to harness AI, cloud, and advanced analytics to improve decision-making, operational efficiency, and risk management. Regardless of where you are in your SAP modernization journey—from SAP ECC to S/4HANA—it adds significant value by optimizing current operations, unlocking deeper insights, and preparing for future growth. Here’s how a data intelligence cloud for AI delivers value for SAP customers:

• S/4HANA Readiness: clean and organize ECC data for analytics, simplifying future migrations to S/4HANA and ensuring cleaner data for improved sales and marketing analytics, financial planning, workforce management, and operational processes.
• Unlocking AI-Driven Insights: integrate with SAP ECC and S/4HANA to provide predictive and prescriptive analytics, unlocking actionable insights from historical and real-time data such as sales trends, customer behavior, and financial performance as well as enabling predictive models for sales forecasting, marketing analytics, workforce optimization, and financial planning for nontechnical users.
• Optimizing Operations Across Functions: apply AI to workforce data to predict hiring needs, optimize scheduling, and improve employee engagement or use AI-driven insights to help refine marketing strategies, improve customer segmentation, and enhance sales pipeline forecasting.
• Enhancing Risk Management and Fraud Detection: machine learning models enhance forecasting and risk detection, identifying anomalies in procurement, financial transactions, and operational expenditures while real-time monitoring detects fraud patterns in trade promotions, procurement activities, and compliance with industry regulations.
• Driving Data-Driven Strategic Planning: enable "what-if" analyses on SAP data for strategic decision-making, helping businesses assess the impact of pricing changes, market expansion, and operational investments while using AI models to predict consumer and market trends, enhancing sales, marketing, and product development strategies.

The bottom line is that a data intelligence cloud for AI empowers organizations to maximize SAP investments through AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and seamless integration. Whether optimizing financial planning, workforce management, or sales and marketing strategies, it ensures operational excellence at any stage of SAP modernization.

Why Wait for Months or Years When you Can see Value in Days?

Emerging open source, no-code intelligent cloud solutions like UBIX can deliver on the promise of a data intelligence cloud for AI to supercharge the quality of reporting and analysis. It starts with a comprehensive access to all available data. By consuming all on-premise infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure and cloud application datasets directly, UBIX makes the integration seamless and ensures that your existing data assets are fully utilized by LOB with a simple natural language query. The good news is that you can realize results in days, not months or even years. This is what also frees data scientists and data analysts to address innovations instead of generating more superfluous reports.

Realizing the promise of a data intelligent cloud for AI starts with an understanding of the realities (as opposed to the hype) of emerging GenAI with a no code solution that delivers on the promise of bridging the communication gap between the average business executive and the average technical/IT resource. Download our free eBook titled “5 steps to AI Business Transformation Success” to help better understand the nuance of emerging GenAI business concepts, and offer details on the 5 steps to ensure digital transformation success. Or if you can spare 22 minutes for a mini–2025 Data Intelligence Cloud for AI Workshop, you can contact one of our experts today.