With rapid advances in technology, leading manufacturers are embracing digital technology at an accelerated pace. Driven by strategic goals, leaders must optimize their operational processes by reducing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing profits.
SAP- a proven, powerful technology solution, enables enterprises to gather insights from data about their customers, employees, or potential partners, that can help them find opportunities and manage risks around their business operations.
During the pandemic the manufacturing sector scrambled to cater to changing needs and paradigms of the industry. During these trying times, the SAP systems responded well to cater to industry-specific needs in an agile and resourceful manner. Recently, it has become even more critical that systems running on SAP must be able to operate on the cloud effectively, so that enterprises can operate efficiently in the changed conditions, safely and reliably.
SAP on Azure
When it comes to running SAP in the cloud, there is no better alternative than Azure. A multitude of customers including SAP’s very own IT Department chose Microsoft Azure to move their strategic internal business systems to. A study by DSAG and a 2020 SAP Insider survey suggested that Microsoft Azure (47%) remains the primary choice for organizations who are looking to deploy their SAP S/4 HANA in public cloud clearly indicating that SAP customers hugely favor Azure.
With 25+ years of relationship, Microsoft and SAP have announced multiple cloud partnerships to bring in new cloud-based solutions and offerings with cloud automation and integration with Microsoft tools such as TEAMS with SAP suite of intelligent solutions. Microsoft has won the prestigious SAP Pinnacle Award two years in a row.
During the recent event of SAP RISE, leadership from Microsoft and SAP havse shared a common vision to help their respective customers in transforming the existing way of connecting and working with them.
SAP on Azure helps customers enhance their efficiency and resiliency
We all know that SAP deployment in data centers requires a lot of initial investment and planning in terms of capacity, resources needed, and future utilization of these resources.
Microsoft Azure delivers agility within the customers’ SAP deployment by providing resources such as large VM instances which are SAP certified to run these specialty workloads in an optimum way. These resources are readily available for customers to consume as well as decommission as needed. With Azure backup and recovery and ASR, Azure provides a reliable and resilient platform for SAP workloads with industry-leading SLAs.
SAP on Azure also helps in extracting insight from SAP data, a suite of other analytics and supporting services such as storage, networking, analytics, AI, and Power BI, etc. A huge amount of data can be stored in Azure storage at an optimum cost and analyzed with multiple analysis services available on Azure. Then the same can be converted into meaningful information/insight by using visualization tools such as Microsoft Power BI.
Customers can quickly create low code workflow apps with Azure Logic Apps to work along with SAP or Non-SAP data. This results in quicker and better utilization of SAP data and helps provide better business outcomes. Other services such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Net App Files, and many compute options provide a strong and complete portfolio to port the SAP workloads on Azure which enhances the efficiency and resiliency of organizations.
Microsoft is not competing with their customers
In an IDC Survey of 2020, 86% of customers responded that it’s a big matter of satisfaction for them that Azure is not a competition or threat to their business. As we all know Microsoft is in the business of enabling enterprises by delivering innovations. Microsoft Azure does not compete with its customer’s business in the health industry, retail e-commerce, banking or even manufacturing.
Customers are assured while running their SAP solution on Azure that it’s a trustworthy partnership. They can build solutions to better connect with their customers, improve their processes, and develop better solutions. Microsoft helps its customers to connect the dots across resource, people, processes, and systems. They provide a reliable platform to run their SAP workloads along with the ecosystem of services that help them get the most out of their investments.
SAP on Azure helps utilize existing investments
By operating SAP solutions on Azure, customers can use their existing investments in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, along with SAP Apps and data to improve their user/customer experience. This also helps in enhancing business processes and collaboration. Microsoft’s further investment to improve the integration between SAP Solutions and Microsoft Teams proves to be very beneficial for customers who need to work remotely. This integration has been very helpful during the pandemic as well where large manufacturing partners continue their production by using these collaboration tools from Microsoft - remotely.
Microsoft’s leading hybrid solutions and in-built support for hybrid infrastructure (including on-prem and multi-cloud tools) is another winning reason for customers to show their trust in Azure when it comes to deploying their mission-critical SAP solutions on cloud.
A study by Total Economic Impact by Forrester Consulting suggests that SAP solutions on Azure can achieve a 30% faster time-to-market for new operations, 112% ROI, and a less than six-month payback period with their investments in SAP on Azure.
To further illustrate, when ServiceNow moved their SAP workloads to Azure they were able to achieve 40% reduced total cost of ownership as well as 80% reduced deployment cycle period.
SAP On Azure: Secure and enterprise ready
Microsoft’s proven practices around cybersecurity on Azure are supported by more than 3500 security experts across the globe. Microsoft Azure holds industry’s largest compliance portfolio as well. All the security services are equipped with state of art controls including firewalls, policies etc. Azure has built-in blueprints for CIS, NIST, and HIPAA, etc., which can be consumed either as-is or with a little refactoring. This provides agility when you want to deploy your SAP workloads in a secured, governed and compliant environment on Azure.
As per an IDC Survey 2020, 90% of customers believe that Microsoft understands their enterprise technology and industry-related requirements in a better way than any other provider.
Why is HCLTech a trusted partner in your SAP journey on Azure
HCLTech and Microsoft have strong relationships based on a common vision to provide innovations that can enable our customers to achieve their business goals. HCLTech is a trusted enabler for its customers SAP on Azure journey by bringing together expertise and support which is based on Microsoft Best practices for SAP.
HCLTech is equipped with SAP on Azure Advanced Specialization which ensures that customer receives a proven and certified team to support their SAP on Azure journey. Whether it’s a green field or brown field deployment, HCLTech has its proprietary IPs and joint solutions for SAP on Azure across applications and infrastructure. HCLTech has been recognized among the leaders in ISG Provider survey - SAP on Azure.
With its in-house solutions, such as SAP SmartDeploy on Azure, Azure SmartScaling solution for automatics caling for SAP servers, and SAP SmartAdmin – HCLTech’ no cost, out of the box solution automates SAP Basis Activities while inducing operational efficiencies for better business uptime, productivity, and reliability.
HCLTech owns SAP Cloud Native Labs which continuously works on new offerings and SAP-based solutions. HCLTech’ own software suite such as DRYiCE and other solutions across SAP Automation and DevOps provide a proven support structure that enables our customers to begin their journey of SAP on Azure.
With its strong partnership with SAP such as SAP Global Partner, SAP Co-innovation Partner and a Microsoft Certified Azure Expert MSP, HCLTech is a reliable and trusted partner when it comes to helping customers in their SAP on Azure journey.
Ref:
https://www.sapinsideronline.com/deployment-approaches-for-sap-s-4hana-research-report/
https://www.dsag.de/externe-news/dsag-investitionsreport-2020-wachablosung-zu-s4hana-vollzogen
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/sap-on-azure-forrester-tei/
