The case for Cloud ERP has been settled for a while. The case for this year has not.
The transformation gap in the numbers
Gartner’s estimate is that over 60% of SAP customers remain on ECC with no decision yet to move, and by 2030 four in ten of today’s ECC customers will still be using ECC in key business areas. Against that, SAPinsider’s ERP Migration and Transformation 2026 Benchmark puts deployment at 55% but full completion at only 34%. That spread is the hybrid state, and the space between deployed and done is where most large enterprises live right now. Partly moved, partly not, and running both.
If you are there… we’ve got good news: you have choices! If Cloud ERP is your destination, there’s a well-documented path that is practical and achievable without massive business disruption and unexpected costs to get there. We know because our customers have done it.
The Howdens pattern
Howdens, the UK’s leading trade kitchen supplier, runs a broad SAP estate including SAP PI, Transportation Management, Quality Issue Management, Commerce, and Manufacturing. SAP directly supports logistics, manufacturing, supply chain, and retail operations.
The Howdens estate began on-premises and moved to SAP RISE, and the move brought exactly the complexity one expects: zero-trust architecture requirements, firewall and port configuration, and connectivity to keep straight between ground to cloud.
Meanwhile, the Basis team’s day job didn’t pause. Daily health checks were manual and consumed expertise that strategically belonged to transformation work. Solution Manager was in the toolkit, but wasn’t fully addressing the needs of the operations team as the migration project began. As Robert Kennady, SAP Basis Engineer at Howdens, put it: “Solution Manager doesn’t tell me red, amber, green.”
The team also evaluated SAP Cloud ALM as part of its longer-term operations strategy and found it promising but needed to extend it to fully hybrid-ready today with coverage across legacy and Cloud ERP in a single view.
And, that experience… that pattern is what’s so common in large enterprises planning the adoption of Cloud ERP: complexity has accumulated over time in the existing estate. Cloud ERP will eventually retire most of that upkeep, but the path there adds a hybrid period first. This means a second platform, a second toolset, a second set of baselines as Cloud ALM arrives alongside what’s already running rather than in place of it. The transition costs before it pays.
The constraint is capacity, not conviction
For many firms, the business case for Cloud ERP survives scrutiny but the staffing plan for the 18 – 36+ months of a large-enterprise migration often doesn’t. Add a resource crunch attempting to run the business as usual and transform to tomorrow’s ERP solution at the same time, and it’s a difficult balance.
So the key question is not “can we afford the migration?” but “can we run the business to the same standard while we do it?“
Howdens answered that by settling the operational layer first. Avantra’s agentless model meant nothing new to deploy into the landscape: the team started its cloud go-live on a Friday, finished Sunday afternoon, and had monitoring running that same evening without a gap in coverage through the cutover weekend. Today the estate runs more than 500 automated daily checks, alerts, and workflows through one platform. A web dispatcher workflow that once took twenty minutes of manual effort completes in forty seconds. ITGC evidence and monthly control reporting generate themselves. Work that took 45 minutes to an hour in the retired systems management solution now takes five to ten.
Graeme Cassidy, Database Basis Manager at Howdens, describes the result plainly: “Having Avantra is like having another Basis team member that never sleeps.”
Shutterfly reached the same conclusion from a different direction. Moving from HEC private cloud to SAP RISE while carrying thousands of performance tickets a year, they consolidated onto one platform, decommissioned Solution Manager and CAST, and cut critical issue resolution from seven days to under an hour.
The lesson
Operational readiness isn’t a phase of migration. It’s the precondition for migration project commencement.
Howdens didn’t add headcount to absorb a cloud transition, a growing integration footprint, and audit obligations all at once. It expanded coverage instead and got the run model stable enough that transformation work could proceed without the day job pushing back on it.
To learn more about the Howdens story and how they successfully adopted Cloud ERP, check it out here.
Slow Cloud ERP adoption isn’t a verdict on Cloud ERP or Cloud ALM. It’s a resourcing problem wearing a scary strategy costume. Settle the run layer, and the timing question gets considerably easier to answer. Now you’re really running.
See how Avantra keeps SAP operations visible, automated, and secure — on-prem, hybrid, or cloud. Explore our Platform pages or get in touch with one of our SAP experts for a customized demo and conversation.