Lemongrass stepping up support to get customers to Clean Core

SAP specialist Lemongrass is expecting an acceleration by customers towards cloud-based services as they look to take advantage of the vision being outlined by the vendor.

The SAP portfolio is heading towards the cloud and the vendor has talked of its Clean Core concept as the destination, which will make it easier for customers to upgrade in the future.

For those operating as specialists in supporting the vendor’s customers, that cloud shift is continuing to provide opportunities.

Eamonn O’Neill, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lemongrass, said it had already been promoting and supporting the move by customers to Rise with SAP, but there were changes that needed to happen beyond that product area.

“Rise gets all of the headlines, but there’s a whole new product strategy. All [of SAP’s] products are being replatformed to cloud versions,” he said.

“There are lots of products that customers have today, installed in either in a datacentre or in a cloud-native account, that have to be replatformed,” he added.

O’Neill said an increasing number of customers were realising they should adopt SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) to enable them to increase digitisation.

“A lot of the innovation SAP is realising is via the Business Technology Platform, so BTP becomes a key part of this. That’s another opportunity for us, and something we’re already investing in and developing the team around,” he said.

O’Neill added that other products would follow, but the ultimate ambition was to unlock the benefits of the Clean Core strategy.

“Clean Core gives customers the agility to adopt innovation faster, and that’s essential for solving this 30-year-old problem of how to push upgrades into SAP more cheaply,” he said.

O’Neill said there was still the need for customer education to outline SAP’s strategy and then overlay what that means in terms of products and migration strategies.

Since launching an advisory service a year ago to guide customers through that process, Lemongrass has seen increased interest, which it expects to accelerate into 2025.

“It starts to become compelling, and I think more and more customers are going to start realising that it’s going to start making more sense,” added O'Neill “Clean Core becomes a very different way of managing SAP, much more agile. And I think customers will start to understand it ... which will help them mobilise.

“There are three steps to get to Rise – advisory, foundation and then the migration. After that is what we call transformation ... because for me, the definition of transformation is you change your operating model. So, it’s not just technology – you change the way you operate,” he said.

Customers are having to evolve and Lemongrass is doing the same, reacting to the emergence of more artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) tools.

“We will be launching in 2025 a solution around using AI to help get to Clean Core to help customers transform their modifications into microservices that are much easier to manage with automation. So that’s bringing, again, some of our capability, which is automation and cloud knowledge in the SAP space with AI and GenAI,” said O’Neill.