Briefing Overview

  • Kyndryl launched consulting services on Tuesday aimed at simplifying data migration for customers adopting SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP. According to the announcement, the Kyndryl Data Transformation Suite for SAP Solutions stems from the company's recently completed 18-month ERP migration project.
  • Kyndryl began its ERP modernization journey in 2023 through the RISE with SAP program. Last summer, the company expanded its alliance with SAP to guide enterprises toward cloud ERP. The IT services provider also developed an application migration blueprint in 2023 for enterprises moving from legacy SAP ERP Central Component systems to S/4HANA.
  • "This is not a one-size-fits-all approach," said Michael Bradshaw, senior vice president and global practice leader for Applications, Data, and AI at Kyndryl. "We use the phrase 'running in the platform' because the challenge for teams lies in understanding the true capabilities they can gain once they enter the platform."

Deep Insights

Kyndryl's ERP migration is part of a broader modernization initiative that began when IBM completed the spin-off of its infrastructure services business in 2021. Bradshaw, then CIO of Kyndryl, had two years to decouple the new company's IT architecture from IBM's legacy systems.

This transformation journey coincided with a major shift in SAP's business—the company encouraged on-premises customers to move to cloud ERP and planned to end support for ECC in 2027. In January, SAP extended business continuity services for customers committed to the RISE with SAP suite through 2033.

Kyndryl's SAP practice is built on lessons learned during its own migration. "The phase we are in now is a continuous evolution," Bradshaw said. "As the business begins to clarify which legacy processes still need to be retained after gaining new system capabilities, we have deliberately limited the implementation of additional features."

To guide customers along the migration path, SAP added generative AI capabilities to its ERP suite in 2023. The company trained the Joule copilot to assist with ERP migrations and embedded the tool into its Ariba supply chain management software suite and business analytics platform last year. In February, SAP enhanced Joule's capabilities by adding agentic automation features.

Kyndryl focused on cleaning up its data assets as it moved toward AI adoption. According to Bradshaw, its finance team iterated on the general ledger more than 50 times to streamline accounting data.

"What enterprises need to do now is build a data foundation so they can leverage any AI capability they want to adopt—whether through SAP, Microsoft, or custom large language models," Bradshaw said. "Many AI proof-of-concept projects fail to move beyond the validation stage because they are in an environment that does not support scaling."