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
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