Cloud solu­tion as plat­form option: SAP 3 Azure

I am Tom­mi Luo­to, ISLET Group’s Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer and one of the own­ers. I want­ed to write this blog as many clients are now con­sid­er­ing the move from SAP ERP sys­tem to SAP S/4HANA. At ISLET our clients and employ­ees have always been at the core. We want to offer our clients the best busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions con­sid­er­ing their needs and wish­es. I have worked with SAP sys­tems for over 10 years and at ISLET I am respon­si­ble for our tech­nol­o­gy vision and strate­gi­cal part­ner­ships. I have always been inter­est­ed in tech­nolo­gies and my pas­sion is to help our clients. Hence, I still con­stant­ly do con­sult­ing as well.

Cur­rent­ly, SAP tech­nolo­gies are fac­ing major rev­o­lu­tion as some years ago SAP launched their next gen­er­a­tion ERP solu­tion, SAP S/4HANA. When con­sid­er­ing the move, every com­pa­ny that cur­rent­ly uses SAP tech­nolo­gies, should also look at the plat­form solu­tions – where they want to run their SAP envi­ron­ment in the future. When I searched for the best and most cost-effi­cient solu­tions for our clients, I noticed cloud solu­tions, like Microsoft Azure, have matured as great plat­form options for SAP S/4HANA sys­tems. Below I tell you why.

Typ­i­cal­ly in the past, SAP ERP has not required sig­nif­i­cant capac­i­ty from its plat­form. With SAP S/4HANA comes the SAP HANA data­base in ques­tion, where­upon sys­tem runs pri­mar­i­ly depen­dent on RAM. Along with the new data­base tech­nol­o­gy, require­ments for plat­form ser­vices have ten fold­ed and plat­form plays a sig­nif­i­cant role from the cost point of view. Scal­a­bil­i­ty, avail­abil­i­ty, cost-effi­cien­cy, the flex­i­bil­i­ty of imple­men­ta­tion and usabil­i­ty as well as uti­liz­ing dif­fer­ent type of cloud ser­vice mod­els, such as Pay-As-You-Go, are at the core when deliv­er­ing SAP ser­vices in the future.

Why am I inter­est­ed in SAP S/4HANA on Azure?

We have a long-stand­ing rela­tion­ship and coop­er­a­tion with Microsoft. I had a one-hour meet­ing with Microsoft Europe SAP organization’s Spe­cial­ist to go through the func­tion­al­i­ties and pos­si­bil­i­ties of SAP S/4HANA on Azure. The meet­ing start­ed with imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA plat­form on Microsoft Azure cloud. We defined all nec­es­sary com­po­nents for the plat­form, such as vir­tu­al machine, RAM, HANA data­base, Lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem and oth­er tools need­ed. As we con­tin­ued our meet­ing, with­in 40 min­utes we had pre-installed three ter­abyte SAP HANA envi­ron­ment ready and running.

I was extreme­ly impressed since typ­i­cal­ly the imple­men­ta­tion of SAP HANA plat­form takes from weeks to months. Rapid and ready to use plat­form ser­vices allow short­er project exe­cu­tion time, faster time to val­ue, agile con­cept­ing and design of new busi­ness mod­els and needs as well as flex­i­ble pos­si­bil­i­ties to use capac­i­ty in more ver­sa­tile way in busi­ness changes. Sure­ly, many orga­ni­za­tions also ben­e­fit from cen­tral­iza­tion. Sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions already use Azure and in-house resources and com­pre­hen­sion of it.

Cloud ser­vices give excit­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty for exper­i­men­ta­tion. We moved agile­ly and on a short peri­od of time our own SAP S/4HANA 1809 Demo sys­tem to Azure plat­form. As an expe­ri­enced SAP con­sul­tant, my expe­ri­ence was excel­lent. The imple­men­ta­tion was rapid, pric­ing was total­ly trans­par­ent, serv­er resources automa­tion was sim­ple, and mon­i­tor­ing was com­plete­ly automatized.

We have pack­aged the move to SAP S/4HANA where one option is S/4HANA Proof of Con­cept on Azure. If you want to dis­cuss mov­ing your envi­ron­ment on Azure or dif­fer­ent paths towards S/4HANA on Azure, please con­tact me!

Author Tom­mi Luo­to leads tech­no­log­i­cal vision and strate­gic part­ner­ships at our island. He deeply dives in tech­no­log­i­cal ocean­ic ecosys­tems while scout­ing new hori­zons with our customers.

If you got inter­est­ed and want to dis­cuss fur­ther, please contact:

Tom­mi Luoto
CTO, Isletter
tommi.​luoto@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1261

#SAP #S4HANA #Microsoft #Azure #Islet­Group #POC #ProofOf­Con­cept #con­ver­sion #pro­to­type