Beyond the Migration: Why Your SAP BW Move Is a Once-in-a-Decade Opportunity
Your SAP BW migration isn’t a burden. It’s the strategic moment most data teams have been waiting for.
With SAP’s end of maintenance approaching in December 2027, organizations across industries are facing a critical question: how do we migrate our SAP BW — without simply recreating the same problems in a new environment?
In this talk from the Data Innovation Summit 2026, Tim Föckersperger from One Data draws on 18 months of conversations with over 50 enterprises to challenge the three most common assumptions about SAP BW migrations — and explain why all three fall short.
The platform debate is real — but it's not the lever.
In “Beyond Migration: Modernizing SAP BW from Legacy to Future-Ready Data Foundation,” Tim Föckersperger, Account Executive at One Data, opened with a scene most data leaders will recognize: A CFO walking into a steering committee, seeing the SAP BW migration line item and saying: “I’m not spending ten million euros to get back the same reports we already have.”
Brownfield vs. greenfield is a false choice.
Every migration is a mixture of both. The art lies in understanding what to keep, what to redesign, and what to rebuild — and that answer can only come from aligning IT and business. The SAP BW migration gives data teams a rare window: management attention, committed budget, and the permission to finally align with stakeholders on what’s truly needed.
Manual migration builds new legacy.
The world doesn’t stop while your team migrates. New requirements, new regulations, and new use cases keep arriving. Without automation, your migration will simply produce new legacy layers in a modern stack. AI-powered automation isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the only way to finish on time, on budget, and with a framework that keeps accelerating your data engineering long after the migration is done.
The bottom line:
SAP BW migration is one of the rare moments where budget, urgency, and executive attention align. Make it count — not as a one-time cleanup, but as the launchpad for a future-proof, AI-ready data foundation.