Forge Ahead With SAP in the Data Era

SAP and Dell Technologies are transforming data at the edge, cloud and core.

Organizations understand that to thrive in the digital economy they must derive better insights from the data they own — and do it in a more automated, reliable way. The faster this process, the faster the time to insights.

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Packathon was organized by SAP, supported by Dell Technologies and Red Hat, engaging the APJ partner community to design and develop industry solutions of high business value by leveraging BTP Services hosted between SAP’s Cloud and Dell Sydney Customer Solution Center (CSC).

SAP data intelligence and SAP HANA infrastructure were hosted from Dell Technologies Sydney CSC running on Red Hat operating system and Red Hat OpenShift Cluster 4.6. These systems were integrated to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, S/4 HANA systems and partner environments (hosting external systems and data sources).

This is a testimony to the role Dell plays as customer infrastructure strategy evolves – edge, cloud or core.

Edge

Enterprises want to become smarter when it comes to their operations, their cloud strategy and their approach to extracting value from an ever‑increasing volume of data.

For businesses running SAP, the key lies in adopting SAP HANA and S/4HANA applications along with a cloud‑smart strategy. SAP S/4HANA along with SAP Intelligent Technologies address this integrative approach by bringing transactional data together with big data and the Internet of Things (IoT).

That means fueling business processes with insights from data across all information sources — at the edge, in core SAP environments, from IOT, data lakes and Hadoop repositories or in the cloud.

When exploring the edge, customers will look to solve one or more objectives:

  • Designing and launching specific edge solutions that target current edge implementations and use cases.
  • Optimizing our portfolio for edge, building a foundation by delivering necessary capabilities across our portfolio.
  • Integrating our technologies into the Dell Technologies Edge Platform, creating edge-specific technology purpose-built for the platform.

In a recent podcast between Dell Technologies and SAP some of the key components of the intelligent enterprise: cloud, edge, data analytics and automation were discussed.

Cloud – complementing RISE with SAP

Dell Technologies is now at the very center of SAP’s transformation strategy to RISE and to S/4HANA. Our customers can now consume SAP S/4HANA as-a-Service with all the benefits of Dell Technologies APEX model on premises or in colocation. RISE with SAP, powered by APEX simplifies the path to the SAP Intelligent Enterprise with a cloud experience on premises in the customer’s own data center or a colocation environment.

A turnkey cloud subscription offering with Dell Technologies APEX, available through SAP, reduces the risk of implementation and outages, and frees up resources so customers can focus on business outcomes provided by SAP S/4HANA.

It helps customers leverage cloud economies and capabilities while keeping their SAP software landscape and data securely in their own data center or colocation, for data sovereignty concerns, for latency or application entanglement reasons or for those customers who simply lack access to hyperscalers.

APEX offers the ease and scale of cloud delivered as-a-Service with simplicity, agility and control for our customers. Create your own on-demand environment with infrastructure and services you customize to order. Deploy a pay-per-use consumption model or an enterprise-scale managed utility.

Core – choosing the right platform

According to Gartner, by 2022 80% of SAP HANA deployments will continue to be on-premises. IDC and Gartner survey results and deployments show a preference for deploying on premises and hybrid model for SAP applications running on HANA Database and their edge-based applications. Organizations prefer a cloud like experience where they want to have features like simplicity, flexibility, quick turnaround for faster innovation and pay-for-use at their fingertips.

One of the most critical decisions a customer makes when planning an SAP S/4HANA migration is selecting the type of deployment option which best suits their business needs: on-premises; private cloud; public cloud; or hybrid cloud. As they evaluate the options, total cost of ownership (TCO) is top of mind.

Based on business requirements and global surveys, top priorities for our customers are migrating some of their SAP landscapes to cloud while keeping key crown jewels on premises. Besides these, some customers that are repatriating from public cloud to on premises have primary reasons such as data residency and regulatory requirements, cyber security and overhead costs, to name a few.

Find out about the result of a three-year TCO comparison of an SAP HANA database and S/4HANA application server landscape that is deployed on-premises, running on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, against another deployed on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform.

The SAP, Dell & Red Hat BTP platform and services is available for customer and partner POC’s , demos, events and industry aligned solution developments. Feel free to reach out to your respective account managers for additional details.

About the Author: Subhranshu Sekhar

Subhranshu Sekhar is a lead architect for SAP and Oracle in Dell APJ DCWS team and in this role looks after all SAP and Oracle opportunities across ANZ. Subhranshu closely interacts with C level executives on understanding their business needs and assists their business in their digital transformation journey. Subhranshu leads all the conversations and opportunities for customers’ adoption of HANA, S/4HANA, Database upgrade, migrations, Performance tuning, HA/DR strategies, usage of emerging technologies Such as AI, blockchain, machine learning in customers’ SAP landscapes and Oracle Databases. He is active in delivering technical sessions as well as presenting in events and bootcamps. A SAP & Oracle Technical Architect with more than 16 years of experience in architectural design and hands on implementation in various release versions of SAP modules and Oracle Versions Subhranshu has profound experience in client liaison prior to deployment of SAP solutions, leading project teams, global rollouts and support engagements.