SAPPHIRE NOW Demo Theater Recap: SAP Runs Better on SAP Sybase ASE
Today, Bill Kozel shares his findings from the SAP Runs Better on SAP Sybase ASE Demo Theater at SAPPHIRE NOW Orlando.
Presenters:
Martin Heisig, VP Enterprise Architecture, SAP AG
Jim Swartz, CIO, Sybase
On Monday, May 14 at 3:30 p.m., this discussion theater focused on how Sybase and SAP migrated key applications to the Sybase ASE relational database management system.
Terry Osborn of Sybase served as moderator, and opened with some perspectives on Sybase ASE, which has 25 years of history, 30,000 customers worldwide, and a customer satisfaction rating of 97%.
Terry then turned the presentation over to Jim Swartz, who noted that his company had long wished that SAP CRM would run on Sybase. “But until the acquisition,” he said, “we had to run on a competitive database.
“We’re really pleased to run CRM on Sybase now,” Jim said. “It was an Christmas present to us, and we opened the package early by becoming part of the ramp-up team.”
Jim explained that Sybase currently runs SAP CRM 7.0, which it uses to support lead, pipeline, and forecast management for more than 700 sales and marketing staff.
Jim’s key takeaways from the migration experience included:
- Leverage standard SAP best practices allowed Sybase to avoid investing in custom solutions
- Combine support pack upgrades plus OSDB migration shortened the project timeline
- There’s no need for special reskilling of application/DBA support staff because of the available monitoring tools
After Jim’s presentation, Martin Heisig described how SAP migrated to Sybase ASE with its Customer Project Management solution (I3P), which is used by SAP Field Sales for customer project and portfolio management.
“This is one of our core systems,” he explained, “and it’s mission critical, managing more than 900 million euros in revenue for our consulting business. It’s heavily used by our field organization, with 13,000 named users and more than100 concurrent users.”
Martin described SAP’s migration schedule, which included completion of a prototype, project decision and project setup, migration of maintenance system, migration of production system, and safeguarding of our production environment.
“It was really a very good experience and we are excited about the outstanding performance and excellent stability” Martin concluded.
After the migration, Martin said, SAP achieved a 15% gain in transaction performance and a 47% improvement in complex transactions and operational reporting.
These metrics put SAP in line with other customers, Martin said. Bayer, for example, has achieved 40% performance improvement through Sybase ASE, while Cargill logged $29 million in operational costs savings. Trimac reduced support calls by 45% with a 35% lower database effort.
Martin’s key takeaways:
- Since the acquisition, there has been strong co-innovation and integrated development between SAP and Sybase
- This has resulted in tight integration of the database with the application platform, as well as optimization of SAP technologies
- The database is preconfigured for an optimal experience, right out of the box
- Future versions of SAP solutions will be certified out of the box for integration with Sybase ASE release
- This results in a lower TCO through simpler administration, predictable costs, and reduced resource utilization
Author: Bill Kozel