Your Best SimCorp People Are About to Be in Two Places at Once

SimCorp's direction of travel is clear: the vendor's roadmap, its commercial incentives, and increasingly its support model are all steering existing on-premise clients toward SaaS. For most clients, that's a reasonable long-term destination. What's less reasonable is the assumption baked into every migration timeline that the same team currently running Dimension day to day can also deliver the migration to it. They usually can't.

The skill gap in a SaaS migration shouldn't be underestimated, but it's a small problem next to the real constraint: capacity. The people who know the platform best are the same people keeping it running, and there's only one team of them.

The Bandwidth Trap

Every SimCorp migration needs people who understand the current configuration, the data, and the workflows well enough to move them safely. That's not a generic skill set you can hire off a bench in six weeks, rather it's built up over years on your specific environment: the custom pricing models, the reconciliation quirks nobody wrote down, the reasons a particular workflow was configured the way it was three platform versions ago. Those same people are, almost by definition, the ones keeping the platform running today: closing NAVs, resolving breaks, supporting month-end.

There is rarely a second team of equal seniority sitting idle, waiting for a migration to justify its existence. So the moment a SaaS transition is scoped, it competes directly for capacity with the operation it's meant to eventually replace. That competition doesn't show up on an org chart or a resourcing spreadsheet. It shows up in calendars, in the gap between what a workshop needs and what a person can actually give it.

What It Looks Like From the Inside

Clients rarely sit down and deliberately decide how to split capacity between BAU and migration. It just erodes, one small decision at a time:

• A senior analyst gets pulled onto migration workshops three days a week, "temporarily."

• A backlog of configuration changes starts to build and nobody quite owns clearing it.

• Support tickets take a day longer to close than they used to.

• A production issue takes longer to resolve than it should, because the person who'd normally catch it in ten minutes was in a cutover planning session instead.

None of it looks like a crisis in the moment. Each decision looks entirely reasonable on its own; of course the person who understands the FX hedging configuration should be in the workshop about migrating it. It only becomes visible as a pattern once go-live has slipped twice, or a client-facing SLA has been missed for the second month running.

Key-Person Risk, Doubled

The two workstreams aren't just competing for time. They're competing for the same small group of irreplaceable people, which means the key-person risk every SimCorp client already lives with doesn't just persist through a migration—it doubles. If your migration architect leaves mid-project, you've lost your migration lead and your best BAU support resource in the same afternoon. There's no natural redundancy to fall back on, because the redundancy was the thing that got quietly used up to staff the migration in the first place.

And the window to fix this is tighter than it looks. Cloud migrations run to vendor-set timelines, with less room to negotiate than a client-led implementation project would have had. There's less time to hire, less time to onboard someone new into your environment, and no real appetite for a learning curve while the clock is running. The point at which this needs solving is early, usually as soon as a migration is scoped, before the resourcing gap has had time to compound.

"Why Not Just Hire a Contractor or Two?"

It's the obvious next question, and worth answering directly rather than skating past it. A contractor or two can absorb some of the load, but it doesn't solve the structural problem: someone still has to manage them, bring them up to speed on your environment and, most importantly, make sure what they decide on one track doesn't quietly contradict what your own team is doing on the other.

A loose group of individual contractors, each reporting into a different manager, tends to add coordination overhead roughly in proportion to the relief it provides. It's a way of adding hands. It isn't a way of removing the risk that the two tracks drift apart.

What Actually Fixes It

The organizations that get through a SaaS transition cleanly are usually the ones that made a deliberate choice early: work out how their own team should split across BAU and migration, and bring in external cover for whatever's left over, rather than letting both tracks quietly starve the same people. For some clients that means handing one track over entirely. For most, it means something less clean: keeping a foothold on both sides and covering the gap on each, with that balance shifting as the project moves through its phases—heavier on migration cover during design and build, heavier on BAU cover as cutover approaches.

What's needed is senior people who already know Dimension deeply, who can flex across whichever side of the work your team can't fully cover and, critically, someone whose job is to make sure decisions made on one track don't get lost or contradicted on the other. Migration and BAU are talking about the same platform; if the people running them aren't talking to each other, you inherit two versions of the truth about your own configuration. A pricing rule changed in BAU this month can easily be missed by a migration workstream still building against last quarter's configuration, and nobody notices until testing, or worse, go-live.

That's the problem we built Transition Coverage at Dimensional Community to solve: your team decides how it wants to split across BAU and migration, DC's coverage flexes to fill whatever's left, and a standing knowledge bridge keeps every track in sync throughout, tapering as you approach go-live rather than continuing as a permanent cost afterward.

If your SimCorp SaaS timeline is starting to look like it's going to eat your BAU team alive, the sooner you decide what you want to hold onto yourselves, the more of the plan stays in your hands. Get in touch with our team today and we'll help you put cover in place before the migration timeline makes the decision for you.