Both product and contract conversion options came with limitations and benefits for customers. The main limitations of product conversion applied to the type of contractual agreements. Customers had to retain existing agreements. They couldn’t convert these into products they didn’t already own. The conversion required line-item mapping and there were no partial conversions, so these needed to be completed in their entirety.
The benefits for customers included permission to undertake a step-by-step conversion on a phased basis. This applied to engines equipped with S/4 products without the need for customers to re-license their entire landscape. Instead, they were permitted to leverage their incumbent ‘classic’ applications until the transition to SAP S/4 HANA had been completed.
In the case of contract conversions, the situation was different. Customers were obliged to complete full contract “wholesale” conversion, as a single, one-off project and this included migrating to new S/4HANA Software Use Agreement Rights.
The benefits for customers included upgrading to next-generation ERP and in-memory DB technology which provided the potential to reconfigure their existing landscape and retiring existing shelf-ware implementations. This option also enabled customers to simplify their SAP contract, negotiate more favorable commercial terms and adopt simpler S4 pricing. In a similar way to the product conversion option, customers could leverage their incumbent “classic” applications until the transition to SAP S/4 HANA had been completed.