South African enterprises seem to be a few steps behind the rest of the world when it comes to fully embracing the benefits of cloud computing for their business systems, and SAP is a good example where the benefits have long since been established.
So says DotModus Business Development Manager, Matt Chittenden, who notes that Google and SAP have a strategic relationship worldwide, and openly collaborate on Cloud deployment initiatives; everywhere except South Africa, that is.
“I’m not saying local companies should wake up and smell the coffee, but there are tangible reasons why a SAP deployment in the Google Cloud makes sense, and no reason why local companies shouldn’t be benefiting already,” says Chittenden. “The same can be said for Google Cloud, which is streets ahead of the competition when it comes to virtualisation technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning – all of which lend themselves to both small and large-scale SAP deployments,” he says. “And yet Google Cloud trails behind Microsoft’s Azure in South Africa, mainly due to our dependence on Microsoft’s legacy enterprise software.”
Migrating a stable SAP system to Google Cloud might at first appear daunting, but given the proper support, planning and deployment services – all readily available locally – both Google and SAP have ready-made tools to make the migration both seamless and cost-effective.
“Migrating your SAP workload to Google Cloud takes weeks, not years, especially if you know what you’re doing – or surround yourself with people that do,” says Chittenden. Once you define your adoption strategy and identify target SAP apps, size and price, and final use cases, all that’s left is to define the sequence of adoption, prototype the solution, run a pilot, and migrate when you’re ready.”
Chittenden says Google Cloud supports a broad range of SAP business solutions, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver BW, SAP Hybris and SAP BusinessObjects BI, among others. Supported database systems include SAP HANA, SQL Server, SAP ASE and IBM Db2. Migrating SAP to Google Cloud improves performance, scalability and security – in some cases by 50 per cent, and reduces infrastructure costs through better default availability without additional costs.
You can also use SAP CAL (Cloud Appliance Library) for immediate provisioning to accelerate deployments with lower start-up costs and shortened timelines, and ignite projects stalled on startup cost or CapEx by creating new opportunities for value added solutions.
“Native Google Cloud capabilities and SAP are a match made in heaven,” says Chittenden. "Petabyte-scale data analytics from Google combined with the power of SAP HANA let you derive better insights and make faster business decisions, while combining SAP applications and Google Cloud machine learning makes for better business outcomes on a much larger scale than previously possible. And if cost is the main concern, Google Cloud offers a competitive cost option for many compute workloads, including per-second billing, committed use discounts, preemptible VMs, no upfront costs, no termination fees, and flexible configurations.”
