In this blog post series, you will read about the experiences of SAP’s Global Technology Partners (GTPs), world leaders who benefit from a 360° relationship with SAP as customers, suppliers, co-innovators, co-developers, and go-to-market partners. We work together and depend on each other to learn and develop the best deployment and implementation solutions in the world. In this series, you will hear from GTPs like: AMD, Bull, Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., IBM, Inspur, Intel, Lenovo, NEC, NetApp, Nutanix, nVidia, Red Hat, Samsung, Supermicro, SUSE, Virtustream, & VMware.
The first edition of this series starts with an interview with Mike Arterbury, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances from Dell EMC, which is part of Dell Technologies. Each GTP was asked the same questions to help standardize their responses for your easy comparison.
1. What’s your elevator pitch – introduce your company, please.
Mike Arterbury: First, thanks for inviting us to participate, Joe.
Dell Technologies has an amazing history. As a $91-billion-dollar organization, we are a powerhouse of seven technology leaders, including Dell, Dell EMC, VMware and Virtustream.
Our mission is simple: to help businesses transform – and for us that means developing technology that drives human progress and shapes innovation.
When it comes to SAP, we’re providing solutions for our customers, from edge to core to cloud – regardless of where they are in their SAP journey; by offering the industry’s most comprehensive and performant infrastructure portfolio.
And we can’t do that without strategic technology partnerships, like the one we’ve had with SAP for more than 20 years. In 2019, Dell once again received the SAP Pinnacle Award for ISV Partner of the Year, for our expertise in “Building Products around the Intelligent Enterprise.” Only 30 partners received that recognition this year, so we’re truly honored.
2. Please discuss your experience drinking SAP’s “champagne."
Mike:
You’ll hear us talk a lot about human progress – and how our customers are using technology to change the world for the better. That includes giving our own employees access to better technology to expand our business and support acquisition integrations.
In 2012, (prior to Dell’s acquisition of EMC), EMC began its own transformation from legacy technology to SAP ERP and CPQ – and at that time we supported 55,000 users and partners. Working alongside SAP, we implemented SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP BW/HANA so EMC could standardize and simplify business processes for finance, manufacturing, sales, partners and vendors.
Dell EMC, (a Dell Technologies business), runs these mission-critical SAP application landscapes in a modern VxBlock virtualized environment. Compared to running the legacy system, we realized significant savings. And Dell EMC’s operations are more agile now – we manage high-volume transactions, like month- and quarter-end close, without interruption to the business. We can run reports with SAP BW in seconds – that’s real-time. And our Dell EMC channel partners and sales organization depend on the SAP mobile app – to enter quotes right from their smart phones.
3. How do you prioritize certified solutions for the SAP ecosystem?
Mike: Well Joe, our mission is aligned with SAP’s, to prepare our customers along their journey to the Intelligent Enterprise – and that includes SAP HANA, SAP S4/HANA, SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo.
We know that delivering SAP-certified solutions helps businesses fast track their implementations – by reducing risk, cost and complexity. That’s why we invest in SAP HANA’s Certification Program for hardware. In fact, Dell EMC has partnered with SAP since the release of SAP HANA in 2011, when SAP first announced the HANA Appliance model for targeted workloads.
Dell EMC’s Certifications include:
Certified and Supported SAP HANA Appliances
Certified Enterprise Storage
Certified HCI Solutions
Dell SAP-certified Servers
We also test and validate Dell EMC Data Protection for SAP and SAP HANA to meet SAP HANA certification standards. Integrations between SAP HANA, Dell EMC Data Protection Suite and Data Domain allows customers to meet their mission critical SLAs.
We collaborate with VMware, Intel and SAP on certification programs that include servers, storage, Hyperconverged Infrastructure and IoT Gateways.
But we go beyond certification. Dell is quite unique in our approach with customers. We make it a priority to talk with them about their challenges, business objectives and goals. We use this information to mimic customer environments in our own labs – and then we create methods, documents and use-case-based outcomes for them. Using HANA-certified components, we show customers how to optimize for performance, balance cost and reduce risk. These use cases range from simple HANA deployments to migrations to SAP S/4HANA, System refresh automation and edge-to-core decision making.
4. Who cares? I mean really – why should customers care about our partnership?
Mike: With Dell EMC Solutions for SAP, our customers are investing in what we refer to as “future-ready IT infrastructure” that reduces cost — so IT can power the edge to the core, with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo.
We see three major areas of opportunity:
- As customers adopt SAP HANA, they first need to consolidate, simplify and protect traditional SAP landscapes. For that, we believe customers need a modern IT foundation. So, we allow them to choose from the broadest portfolio of Dell EMC SAP HANA TDI-certified infrastructure options.
- Second, when it comes to running mission-critical SAP and moving to SAP S/4HANA, cloud-adopters are demanding consistent infrastructure and operations from the data center to the cloud, with better data integration.
To address this, Dell Technologies – with Dell EMC and VMware – provides the Dell Technologies Cloud – that we just announced this year – so you can deploy applications and data in the right cloud model for your business. It could be a private cloud that is fully under your control, or a public cloud that provides the resources for you, or at the edge.
- And third, organizations are turning to emerging technologies like AI and IoT – automation that’s powering data-driven workloads with SAP Leonardo. But first, they want to know that their data centers can manage data closer to where it’s being created – from the edge to the core.
We’re working with our SAP customers to create a strategy that orchestrates data “at the core,” with SAP Data Hub on Dell EMC infrastructure. And allows them to make decisions in real-time “at the edge” with SAP Edge Services on SAP-certified Dell Edge gateways.
Dell Technologies is the only vendor to offer a full edge-to-core-to-cloud offering. Our
Dell EMC Global SAP Center of Excellence is equipped with SAP-certified servers, storage and networking – and here we showcase SAP infrastructure and business use cases around Blockchain (with
Camelot ITLab), Data Hub (with
Red Hat) and resource optimization (with
Intense AG).
5. As a trusted partner, when should SAP customers consider contacting you?
Mike: Dell EMC has a significant base of enterprise customers and, as you might expect, a majority run SAP. So, our SAP solutions are strategic to their businesses – and we’re one of SAP’s largest Global Technology partners.
Customers purchase SAP-certified infrastructure solutions from us for the SAP HANA database as well as SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo platforms. These businesses rely on Dell EMC for solution building and consulting services as they evolve to an infrastructure that uses modular hardware, to dynamically manage IT resources.
For more than two decades, Dell EMC and SAP have collaborated to implement hundreds of customer solutions. The Dell EMC Global SAP Center of Excellence, located at the PartnerPort in Walldorf, is where we develop innovative infrastructure for SAP and best practices for customers’ SAP solutions – from edge to core to cloud. Our joint customers learn from demos, Proof-of-Concepts in the datacenter, technical briefings and events – onsite in the center or remotely.
Additionally, Dell EMC and SAP work closely to build joint solutions at SAP Co-Innovation Labs and customer briefing center locations in Walldorf, Palo Alto, Houston (Oil and Gas), Tokyo, and Singapore to name a few.
Finally, we see “the edge” to be a growing area of business, as customers analyze local data for faster decision making. That’s why Dell has become a reseller for SAP Edge Services. Dell sells the SAP-certified Dell EMC IoT Gateway Edge Device which is tested and validated with SAP Edge Processing software to run SAP IoT applications at the edge.
6. Please discuss how SAP drinks your “champagne."
Mike: It’s no secret that SAP manages one of the largest data centers in the world – and Dell Technologies provides the next-gen platform and dynamic infrastructure – to help the SAP business evolve to the intelligent enterprise.
SAP is virtualizing and automating its own software-defined data center for the digital era, starting with a comprehensive VMware platform. This VMware environment is SAP HANA-ready, so SAP has the flexibility to deploy SAP landscapes, including SAP Concur and SAP Ariba, in co-located and SAP-managed data centers, at scale.
Another key component of the Dell Technologies platform is Dell EMC Data Protection. Since SAP operates multiple datacenters across the globe, backing up to petabytes of data requires meeting some tough SLAs.
To run those daily business operations, SAP depends on Data Domain, with Data Domain Boost Enterprise – SAP IT gets faster backups, low network throughput/CPU utilization, and space savings using technologies like variable-length deduplication and compression.
Our SAP customers agree – SAP HANA must be supported with integrated data protection. That’s because they consider SAP HANA and SAP workloads to be the backbone of their mission-critical apps.
7. As an SAP ecosystem ally, how do you educate SAP customers on our joint potential to digitize & transform their business?
Mike: Well, as platinum and gold sponsors of SAP SAPPHIRE and ASUG annual conferences for the past 25-plus years, both Dell and Dell EMC frequently showcase solutions for SAP.
And there’s SAP TechEd, which is essential for reaching the more technical audiences leading the migrations to SAP S/4HANA. We’ll be sharing how we can help them simplify the move to SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA while getting ready to deploy IoT at the edge and the core.
Our mission is aligned to SAP’s – to show customers how we help them get to SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise with less risk and greater cost efficiency.
We are always looking for new ways to keep SAP customers across the globe informed about Dell Technologies’ latest developments and our focus on co-innovation with SAP.
Most organizations are using multiple cloud environments and we know that developing a successful multi-cloud strategy can be a challenge. That’s why Dell Technologies is investing with global tech companies like VMware and systems integrators such as Deloitte – to provide data center capabilities and services that are ready-built for the intelligent enterprise. Only then can IT evolve its infrastructure to prepare for the journey to SAP HANA, S4/HANA and SAP Leonardo.
It’s not always about technology. Just last month, in partnership with
@SAP, Dell sponsored a three-day
#AutismatWork Hackathon in Round Rock, Texas. Together, we helped raise awareness of the contributions and innovations individuals on the Autism spectrum are making in the workforce and across the industry today.
