Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Darryl Griffiths

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Darryl Griffiths

Eursap’s Ask-the-SAP-Expert article is a feature designed to give you up-to-date information on the latest SAP news, featuring key thought leaders in the SAP space, as well as regular interviews with the best SAP consultants in the business.

This month, we feature Darryl Griffiths, SAP cloud architect, visionary, technical guru, and recorder of popular SAP YouTube newsletters, with over 20 years’ experience with SAP.

Darryl, welcome and thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk to us. Firstly, can you give our readers a brief intro?

Having started my IT career in the late 90s, I didn’t enter the job market through the traditional method. Instead of going to university, I completed an apprenticeship. In the UK an apprenticeship offers a vocational qualification, which essentially means learning on the job.

In those early years I worked on the helpdesk, then progressed to systems analyst and ended up administering Oracle databases on Unix systems. Eventually I found myself on an SAP implementation project in 2004.

How did you transition from traditional SAP basis to cloud-based solutions, particularly with S/4HANA?

It was a stroke of luck after having set a good precedent on a previous datacentre migration project. As a contractor at the time, I was asked to come back to a customer and help them move to Azure and migrate from ECC6 to S/4HANA 1709. That was the beginning of my cloud technology journey.

Back in early 2018 we were setting the standards for SAP on Azure. It was the largest S/4HANA deployment on Azure in Europe, and we were finding all sorts of architectural issues that Azure could not cope with.

Looking back over your 20+ years in SAP, if you could give one piece of career advice to your younger self when you were starting in SAP, what would it be?

My advice would be don’t set a goal for where you want to be. The future and the technology is too dynamic. Go with the flow and push yourself out of your comfort zone.

You must have seen a lot in your various roles over the years, working for some of the world’s largest systems integrators. How do you envision the SAP ecosystem evolving over the next 5-10 years, particularly in relation to cloud technologies?

The monolith of traditional SAP architectures is breaking down. It is heading to a more loosely coupled architecture, much like all systems, whether SAP or non-SAP. There will be multiple platforms, solutions and systems. The key will be integration.

Eventually, the location of solutions will not matter, they will be consumable in a plug-and-play style.

And drilling down on those new cloud technologies, which innovations do you think are the most exciting?

Back when web services first came around there was the idea of a directory of end-points that allowed discovery of web services to allow easy integration and, in some regards, some way of automating the integration.

Now we have AI and our architecture standards have evolved to be more API focused in the cloud. I think we will start to see dynamic re-architecting of systems. Architecture has traditionally been fixed in the medium to long-term, but I believe this will change. We will see an AI recognising the need for a new integration based on a simple request for a new capability. The AI will handle the integration changes.

We are seeing this strategy with tools such as LeanIX, which is like CMDB for business processes.

There must be some challenges though. What do you consider to be the biggest challenges for customers when migrating legacy SAP systems to S/4HANA in the cloud?

The obvious challenge is data. How much data do you need to migrate, if any at all.

But apart from this, the toughest challenge will be the adoption of a more continuous approach to software change adoption. S/4HANA Public Cloud is constantly changing and the customer needs to be continually looking at those changes, testing them and at the same time, adopting new functionality to meet the business demands. The same is true for S/4HANA Private Cloud, as the customer has an obligation to remain at least N-1.

Can you share a complex SAP S/4HANA cloud implementation project you’ve worked on and how you overcame its challenges?

When you imagine S/4HANA Public Cloud being SaaS, it comes with a stereotype that it will be simply switched on and can be consumed. But it is never that simple.

For global companies with many small subsidiaries, the adoption of S/4HANA Public Cloud provides a great opportunity to standardise, but it takes quite a bit of effort actually to get there.

A lot of the time the problem is the same as it has always been:
• Are the localisations present for the target countries?
• Will there need to be a lot of development?

Multi-country rollouts of S/4HANA Public Cloud need to define a top-down Enterprise Architecture analysis of the existing capabilities for each country and then a fit-gap against the available S/4HANA localisations, before a global template can be determined. Ideally you want one global template that serves as the root and covers the majority of countries.

From there you can drill into the gaps and look at how best they can be filled with extensions or side-by-side development.

Composable ERP is all the rage at the moment, with applications springing up everywhere, using different technologies, to plug gaps in the market. Can you discuss your experience with integrating SAP cloud solutions with other cloud-native applications or services?

We’ve got a strange couple of years coming up between 2025 and 2027 where a lot of SAP technology products are going end-of-life. Middleware solutions like SAP PO are often used to integrate between SAP and government tax authorities, for example.

The SAP standard approach would be to migrate from SAP PO to SAP Cloud Integration Suite, but that is not the only way.

We now have other cloud-based integration products available. One that I find interesting is the Azure API Manager. It is a SaaS solution for integration using APIs and could be used for S/4HANA on-premise, on-premise in Azure or even S/4HANA Public or Private Cloud. It is that flexible. I’ve worked on a project to integrate an S/4HANA system in Azure, with a custom non-SAP API gateway, using Azure API Manager and from start to finish it was done in less than a month.

A part of your mission is to stay abreast of industry trends and feed that knowledge to senior leadership. How do you stay updated with the rapidly evolving SAP cloud technologies and best practices?

I tend to follow key people on LinkedIn. Quite a few of the SAP product managers post on LinkedIn.

I also regularly review the SAP notes and documentation for information and changes. It’s not a simple task.

Finally, I watch the remote sessions like Sapphire. I got an awful lot of information from watching 40 videos from Sapphire 2024.

The mention of “best practices” is a tricky one, because one customer’s “best practice” is another customer’s “poor practice”. So, it is really knowing about capability rather than whether that capability is “best practice”.

Let’s talk about your YouTube channel. You’ve been running a weekly newsletter for a while now, which SAP fans like me enjoy. How and why did you get started?

I started in January 2024 with a challenge to myself. I had never before recorded a video for YouTube. I decided to make the challenge achievable by making small duration videos that summarise the weekly SAP tech related news. What I didn’t realise was that for every say six minutes of video, it can take as much as five hours of effort.

And what is the motivation to carry on week after week, given that this must be a significant amount of work for you? We, as the SAP community are not complaining – please carry on!

Even with the high effort, it is a rewarding challenge. I have found out a lot of information about who is adopting RISE, who is choosing third party maintenance, which vulnerabilities are hot and which operating systems are currently in support versus going out of support in the coming years.

If you force yourself to immerse in these things, you get a routine and you gain the knowledge.

You’ve talked a lot about AI and machine learning in your YouTube videos. How do you see the role of AI and machine learning impacting SAP S/4HANA cloud solutions in the near future?

Back in my 2018 S/4HANA project, ML was being consumed through SAP Leonardo to perform invoice matching.

So while we think of AI and ML being new, they are not really. What we are seeing though is a greater adoption of AI now we have all these great tools and SDKs that make it easy. Now, we see AI as mainly helping with some of the more text-based burden. However, it will increase in scope over time.

More than likely it is already used for predictive failure analysis inside the datacentres of the hyperscalers, which will be helping to improve uptime of infrastructure and reducing costs.

We will see more AI involved in testing in the coming years, to help those customers with their upgrade cadence.

What about downtime, then Darryl – do you get much and if so, how do you spend it?

I have a young daughter, so downtime is contextual. But when I’m not working on something SAP related I can be found playing crazy kids cards games, doing Alexa Karaoke or my favourite of all, having a beer with friends.

Just for fun then, Darryl – think of all the ERP products that are out there in the marketplace. If you could cast SAP as a superhero, which superhero would it be, and who would be its arch-nemesis?

I’ve never really got into the comic book heroes, I’m more of a Star Wars and Star Trek guy, so my knowledge is limited but I’m going to propose SAP would be Batman.

Here’s why. Whenever I go to a party and someone asks me what I do, I start with the old “I work in IT.” If they come back at me with “what specifically” I hit them with “SAP.” At this point, they either know I’m Batman (i.e. they know the significance of SAP products on the global economy), or they come back with the “what’s SAP” and have no idea.

The nemesis to Batman would be… Dr Freeze. Also known as Excel 😊 Any company using Excel still is surely living in the dark ages.

And finally, the question we always ask our interviewees – if you had some advice for aspiring SAP consultants in today’s marketplace, what would it be?

My advice is do something that you enjoy. A career in IT is a long-haul flight – you need entertainment along the way. I’m blessed with a wacky sense of humour, which just about keeps me sane (or does it??)

Darryl Griffiths talked to Jon Simmonds

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