Back in 2003, I accidentally became the go-to person for SAP automation in the U.S.  It was a funny story involving a rumor about a competitor doing live SAP demos, but the punchline is, I got a shiny new laptop and a new career focus out of it.

A few years later, my team and I were deep into automating SAP system copies for our customers, and then SAP introduced Landscape Management (LaMa). SAP Basis teams everywhere, including many I’ve spoken with, started gravitating to LaMa. It made sense. LaMa helped us all transition from tedious manual tasks to more strategic landscape orchestration.

Well, if you’ve been following the news, you know there’s a plot twist.

SAP has announced that mainstream maintenance for SAP LaMa 3.0 will end on December 31, 2027, with no plans for extended maintenance. To add to the surprise, the intended successor, SAP Landscape Management Cloud, has been discontinued before it even got going.

Let's be honest: For those who have invested time, resources, and processes into LaMa, this news creates a wave of uncertainty. If you're an SAP Basis administrator, you probably rely on LaMa for some heavy lifting. The question on everyone's mind is, "What now?"

Here's my take: This isn't a crisis. This is a strategic inflection point. It’s a golden opportunity to rethink and modernize your entire approach to SAP operations.

Why the LaMa retirement hits home: The top 5 tasks

To understand the path forward, we first have to appreciate just how much LaMa does for so many teams. From my experience, its value is centered on these five core, time-saving functions:

  1. System refresh and system copy/clone: This is the big one. Manually refreshing a quality assurance or test system with production data is a multi-day, error-prone headache involving Basis, DBA, and storage teams. LaMa turned this into a reliable, automated flow.
  2. Centralized start/stop: For mass maintenance, or simply saving on cloud infrastructure costs by shutting down non-production systems overnight, LaMa gave us a single console to manage it all. No more logging into dozens of instances.
  3. System relocation (host migration): Moving an SAP application server or database is complex. LaMa orchestrates the detaching, moving, and reattaching of resources with minimal downtime.
  4. Automated patching and kernel upgrades: These processes are constant, repetitive tasks that are ripe for manual error. LaMa provided a way to define and consistently automate the sequence of stopping, patching, and restarting systems.
  5. Managing high-availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) failover: LaMa gave us a guided, central interface for critical DR testing and responding to real emergencies, simplifying high-stress procedures.

Losing all this is no small thing. Refreshes with production-like data are non-negotiable for delivering quality code. Downstream data pipelines that rely on this data, whether they’re running in Azure, AWS, or Google, will be affected. And for global enterprises, losing that central control plane for instances is a nightmare.

From tool replacement to process orchestration: The path forward

There is temptation to search for a one-to-one replacement for LaMa. I believe that’s the wrong way to look at it. SAP's strategy is clearly shifting towards its RISE and GROW with SAP offerings, which manage more of the landscape for you. For those of us managing our own landscapes, this is a chance to think bigger.

This is our opportunity to close the "agility gap"—the gap between how fast we can provision infrastructure and how slowly we manage complex, manual application-layer tasks.

So, what are the first steps?

  1. Inventory your reality: Before you can plan your future, you have to know where you stand. Work with your teams to build a complete inventory of every single process LaMa is currently automating. You can't fix what you can't see.
  2. Think process, not just tools: Instead of asking "What tool will replace LaMa?", ask "How can we better orchestrate our end-to-end SAP processes?" This means bringing infrastructure and Basis teams together. The teams responsible for host migrations and HA/DR need to be part of the conversation, not just handed a ticket. It's about building a cohesive automation fabric, not just swapping out a component.
  3. Embrace heterogeneity: Your SAP systems don't operate in a vacuum. They are part of a larger enterprise ecosystem. They feed data warehouses and connect to cloud services. Your future automation strategy must be platform-agnostic and capable of orchestrating complex workflows across SAP and non-SAP systems alike.

The retirement of LaMa isn't an ending. It's an invitation to elevate your strategy from task-based automation to true, end-to-end enterprise process orchestration. It's a chance to build something more resilient, more efficient, and more valuable to the business.