Non-NetWeaver applications

The main focus of this book is on traditional SAP applications based on the NetWeaver stack and written in ABAP or Java, along with the newer applications such as SAP S/4HANA, which since release 1809 uses the ABAP Platform for S/4HANA rather than the NetWeaver stack. However, there are also SAP applications that are not based on this technology, the most notable being SAP hybris.

The company hybris was founded in 1997 in Switzerland and developed an omnichannel commerce platform. SAP acquired hybris in 2013, and has gradually integrated it into their product portfolio. However, hybris continues to use its own quite different technology stack, written in Java and supported on either VMs or Containers, and supporting a number of database management systems including Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA.

Today SAP hybris is available as both a SaaS offering under the name SAP C/4HANA as well as an on-premises edition that can leverage Azure IaaS and PaaS services, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Further details on running SAP hybris on Azure are given in the later chapters of this book.

Having discussed how you can migrate both SAP NetWeaver-based applications as well as non-NetWeaver applications, let us now discuss who should carry out the migration.