Automation Blog

The 2027 SAP LaMa Retirement: A Guide to Modernizing Your SAP Automation Strategy

Written by Dave Kellermanns | Oct 22, 2025 5:52:56 PM

The news is official: SAP Landscape Manager (LaMa) is set for retirement in 2027. For many SAP Basis leaders, the first instinct might be to find a simple, direct replacement. However, this is a moment to pause and think bigger.

The ticking clock on LaMa isn't a crisis; it's a golden opportunity. It’s your chance to move beyond the limitations of the past and fundamentally upgrade your automation strategy to meet the demands of the modern business. This is your moment to solve the one problem that has plagued SAP operations for decades: the slow, manual, and high-risk system copy process.

The "agility gap": Why a simple LaMa replacement isn't enough

Let's be honest. Even with tools like LaMa, the system refresh process has remained a major bottleneck. Your business has invested heavily in a fast, agile private cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which is capable of provisioning infrastructure in minutes. Yet, when the business needs a refreshed SAP environment for a critical project, your team is still forced to quote timelines in days or weeks.

This is the "agility gap." It’s the chasm between a fast infrastructure and slow, manual application management. It’s a gap characterized by multi-page runbooks, late nights spent running BDLS, and a high risk of human error that can derail a project. It’s the reason your highly paid experts are tied up with repetitive toil instead of driving innovation.

Simply implementing a tool that replicates LaMa’s features just perpetuates this gap. The real solution lies in shifting your thinking from basic task scheduling to true, end-to-end process orchestration.

Don't just replace, modernize: The power of orchestration

A modern SAP automation strategy doesn’t just manage a few landscape tasks. It acts as a true "orchestrator of orchestrators," providing a single, unified control plane to manage the entire end-to-end process.
Imagine a workflow that:

  1. Calls out to infrastructure to clone the required infrastructure.
  2. Automates all the necessary pre-copy preparations.
  3. Executes the system copy.
  4. Then, orchestrates the hundreds of critical but tedious post-copy steps—reconfiguring profiles, running BDLS, updating RFC destinations, and managing user roles—all without manual intervention.

This is the difference between basic scheduling and enterprise-grade orchestration. It’s how you finally close the agility gap and deliver on the true promise of your private cloud.

Beyond execution: What an enterprise-grade platform delivers

A modern platform moves beyond simple execution to provide the governance and intelligence that manual scripts and legacy tools simply can't. When evaluating your next step, you should be looking for the following capabilities, which can transform your operations into a predictable, resilient, and auditable service:

  • Predictive SLA management. See whether a process is at risk of missing its deadline—before it completes. This allows you to move from reactive firefighting to proactive management and build trust with your internal customers.
  • Effortless audit and compliance. Leverage an unalterable, automatically generated audit trail for every single step of every process. This ends the "war room" culture of blame and makes providing proof of execution to auditors a simple, push-button task.
  • Governed self-service. Gain the power to integrate with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, allowing development teams to request a fully refreshed SAP environment from a service catalog. They get the on-demand service they want, while you retain full governance and control.

The retirement of SAP LaMa has started a conversation in hundreds of companies. By choosing to modernize, you can position your SAP Basis team not as a cost center struggling to keep the lights on, but as a strategic enabler that accelerates the entire business.

Take the next step

Navigating this transition requires a clear strategy. To help you build your plan, we've developed the following resources, which offer comprehensive guidance for modernizing SAP operations:
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