Your infrastructure team has delivered a world-class private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which promises to provide resources with unprecedented speed. In theory, your business should be more agile than ever. 70% of SAP environments are hosted on VCF, yet when a critical S/4HANA project needs a fresh test environment, the request still takes days or even weeks to fulfill.

This frustrating disconnect isn't a reflection of your team's skill; it's a symptom of the "agility gap": the chasm between fast, automated infrastructure provisioning and the slow, manual, and highly complex application-level tasks required to make an SAP system truly usable.

The reality of the agility gap for SAP Basis

While VCF can clone a server's infrastructure in minutes, the real work for the SAP Basis team begins well before the clone and continues afterwards. Provisioning the new infrastructure with data from production (also known as SAP System Refresh), is dominated by hundreds of manual, error-prone pre- and post-copy tasks. This includes everything from BDLS conversions, printer definitions and RFC destination updates to intricate client-specific configurations.

This manual effort, often guided by multi-page runbooks, is where the agility promise of the cloud breaks down. The result?

  • Project delays: Critical digital transformation initiatives, like S/4HANA migrations, are stalled while development and test teams wait for up-to-date environments.
  • Stale data: Project teams are often forced to work with outdated production data, leading to testing failures and increased risk when changes go live.
  • Perceived bottleneck: Despite the speed of the underlying infrastructure, the SAP Basis team is often seen as the blocker, caught between the promises of the infrastructure team and the demands of the business.

Closing the gap with application-aware orchestration

To solve this, you don't need faster infrastructure; you need smarter, application-aware automation that is aligned with the unique complexities of SAP. This is where Automic Automation, also from Broadcom, provides the bridge. With the mainstream maintenance for      private cloud SAP Landscape Management (LaMa) 3.0 ending in 2027, finding a robust, future-proof alternative is no longer optional—it's a necessity.

Automic serves as a central orchestration engine that automates the entire end-to-end system refresh lifecycle. It takes the baton from VCF and executes every subsequent application-level step, transforming a week-long manual ordeal into a governed, automated service.

This isn't a mythical "push-button" solution that ignores your unique environment. The path to automation is practical and collaborative. A typical implementation for a single system copy path takes up to two weeks. During this time, our services team works with yours to transcribe your existing manual runbooks and incorporate any custom scripts you've developed into the Automic workflow. We provide standard templates that are then tailored to produce your specific copy process. This initial engagement empowers your SAP Basis team to become self-sufficient, enabling them to build out additional copy paths as needed.

For one global manufacturer, this approach meant reducing the elapsed time it took to complete a system copy from 35 days to just one—a 98% reduction in critical system downtime.

By orchestrating the complete, end-to-end process, you can:

  • Slash refresh times with confidence: Deliver fully validated SAP systems significantly faster. While the total time will always depend on long-running native processes like your BDLS execution, Automic orchestrates all other tasks. The built-in predictive SLA management engine actively monitors the entire process, alerting you only if a step is forecast to miss its target. This frees your team from babysitting the refresh and gives you proactive control.
  • Guarantee audit and compliance: Generate a complete, immutable audit trail for every single refresh. Every task, every parameter, and the user who initiated the action is logged automatically. This provides a non-negotiable, unchangeable record of truth to satisfy any internal or external compliance demand.
  • Eliminate manual errors: Replace brittle, error-prone checklists with robust, governed automation to ensure consistent and reliable outcomes every time.
  • Empower customers with governed self-service: Enable development teams to get the up-to-date environments they need, on-demand, through a self-service portal. This isn't a loss of control; it's controlled delegation. Every request and execution is subject to your governance rules and is fully captured in the audit log, ensuring you have full visibility and control over your landscape.

From bottleneck to business accelerator

The agility gap puts your team in a difficult position. Closing it gives you back control. By automating the application layer, you not only solve your most time-consuming operational challenge but also elevate the value of the entire VCF platform. Plus, you ensure your operations are ready when legacy tools are retired.

You move from being reactive to proactive, transforming your team from a perceived bottleneck into a strategic enabler that accelerates project delivery and guarantees business outcomes.