Today, entrepreneurs are able to access large amounts of data that are generated throughout the enterprise. But the quantity alone is of little use, it’s necessary to gain business-related knowledge in real-time. For this reason, and to be ready for the digital business, many companies are planning to migrate their SAP ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA – a real-time Enterprise Resource Management Suite, based on the SAP HANA in-memory platform. With the help of state-of-the-art IT infrastructure solutions from Dell, which build a reliable and future-proof foundation for SAP HANA environments, this is particularly successful. For organizations, the digitization offers a lot of opportunities, but it also challenges IT. Often, existing ERP systems contain large amounts of data. The question, however, is how to automatically and quickly gain relevant insights from this data. SAP S/4HANA does exactly that.
Digital transformation is changing the company
Anyone who “digitizes” the organization does not just introduce a few new technologies and update the hardware. No, they change the company fundamentally. The first car from Henry Ford still looked like a carriage without horses, but with an engine. Modern cars have nothing in common with carriages. In the meantime, it is often not even about products like cars, but the outcome of using a product. Cars are no longer sold just as a single product, they can also be sold on a pay per use model. Or by means of Internet of Things technologies, new and different services can be offered in the “connected car”, such as the automated scheduling of the next service inspection date based on the permanently measured data in the car. To realize these new IT enabled business models, all data must be made measurable. That means all processes need to be digitized in order to collect, to connect, to process and to analyze a variety of data and finally to predict and to affect results.
And so it is with organizations before and after digital transformation. The most important changes are:
- IT becomes the driving force of change in everyday business.
- Business value will be created via new and different ways, because there are many new possibilities.
- The Internet of Things (IoT) enable people to work differently and processes become much more efficient.
- New business models are created, such as pay-per-use selling instead of just product selling
- Processes can be analyzed much better in order to act predictively and proactively and to optimize outcome.
SAP S/4HANA is designed to enable entrepreneurs to manage these changes and achieve the new goals. The real-time enterprise resource management suite can quickly and efficiently process the complex data that are generated by digitization.
Finding the right infrastructure foundation for S/4 HANA
In order to realize the advantages of SAP S/4 HANA in its entirety, a modern and high-performance infrastructure foundation is necessary. Depending on the requirements of the organization, different routes can be effective on the journey of digital transformation. One goal of migrating an existing ERP system landscape to SAP S/4 HANA is to consolidate, automate and simplify IT to reduce costs and increase the productivity of SAP and database administrators and IT operations staff.
Dell provides a wide range of SAP-certified hardware, as well as a variety of deployment options that include on-premises, off-premises cloud, and hybrid environments. The Dell portfolio covers the full continuum of solutions: from build (ready nodes, bundles, and systems) to buy (converged and hyper-converged systems, hybrid cloud platforms). Read about an example customer deployment of a new SAP HANA infrastructure environment.
Dell as a partner with decades of experience
If your company plans to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, you can avoid possible pitfalls with the expertise of Dell and technical support for the appropriate infrastructure foundation. Even if your organization has already begun the migration, involving our experts is possible at any time. We have been working closely with SAP for over two decades and can guide infrastructure choices for organization and provide input into deployment options to best fit our customers’ needs. We have implemented hundreds of solutions for customers in a variety of industries. We are also specialized in the entire infrastructure solution spectrum for SAP S/4HANA, such as converged and hyper-converged systems as well as hybrid cloud platforms.
Dell Blueprints make it easier to move to SAP HANA
In order to enable your company to successfully implement the transition to a modern and simplified IT infrastructure within a very short time, we created the Dell Blueprints program, including a dedicated program for business applications, such as SAP. At the core, the Blueprints program is focused on accelerating our customers’ IT to effectively address all infrastructure and data center challenges.
Our customers may take advantage of consulting and guidance of the Dell Global SAP Center of Excellence (GSCoE) either on-site at the PartnerPort on SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, or at the customers’ location supported by GSCoE members around the globe, or remotely. Our experienced specialist team, located around the globe, provide thought leadership, best practices, research, guidance and training in SAP business and infrastructure solutions.
This leading offer also includes joint development of concepts up to architectural recommendations, individually tailored to the customer’s specific requirements, as well as the analysis and testing of concrete SAP solutions, such as diverse SAP infrastructure and business showcases.
For this purpose, our state-of-the-art high-end data center, optimally equipped with Intel® processor based servers and a total of 48Tbytes of memory for the development and proof-of-concept testing of SAP environments, is available and enables our customers to deploy SAP solutions faster, more efficiently and effectively, and finally to give them a competitive advantage through the new IT-generated business value.
Conclusion
Organizations are increasingly confronted with the challenges of digital and IT transformation. With Dell infrastructure solutions and a variety of deployment options, a modern, high-performance, and reliable foundation can be created for the next generation of SAP’s Enterprise Resource Management Suite – SAP S/4 HANA
If you are thinking about implementing SAP S/4HANA, please contact the experts at the Dell Global SAP Center of Excellence. And Visit us at SAPPHIRE 2017 in Orlando (FL) at booth #758
