CIO Conversation: SAP runs SAP, but does SAP rapidly deploy SAP?

Todays ever changing business environment requires flexible and agile IT solutions, thus requiring Chief Information Officers (CIO) to face multiple challenges. On the one hand, CIO’s need to provide stable, reliable, world-class IT services to support a global business. On the other hand, IT needs to support new business models and provide fresh innovations to enable new business opportunities.

SAP faces the same challenges. We must not only make our customers ‘run better’ with our best in class IT solutions, but we must also make SAP ‘run better’ as well. But due to SAP‘s ongoing business transformation, it is important for our overall success to adopt new innovative solutions in a very short timeframe – we want to start utilizing our cutting-edge solutions immediately, not months/years from now!. Especially for SAP‘s In-Memory technology HANA, which is providing new game changing solutions, and is able to provide critical information in real-time. And also for our Mobile solutions, which are playing an important role to consume information in an easy way, everywhere, no matter if you are in the office, on the road, or at the airport (or even on a plane J). In the past, the traditional implementation of new solutions took months or even years. However, with SAP‘s new rapid-deployment-solutions we are able to deploy innovative solutions quickly and easily, with preconfigured software and content within days/weeks, instead of months/years.

For example, recently during our migration of our internal business system to the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise database (ASE) we implemented a rapid-deployment solution. We were able to migrate a complete system landscape (5 systems in total) in less than 4 weeks and with very little impact to our business. This rapid-deployment solution helped us to manage ASE in an efficient way and required a minimal training effort for our database administrators. This was very important to us since this system is mission critical to our business – all of our customer related projects are managed in this system! After the migration we were able to improve the performance of critical transactions by a factor of 2, while in the same step we were able to
significantly reduce overall total cost of ownership.

Also, at SAP we implemented some new rapid-deployment solutions for Finance. For example, we implemented the new profitability analysis (CO-PA) with HANA using a rapid-deployment solution. We were able to deploy these solutions in days without any impact to our business and risk free! The new profitability scenario is 120x faster than before and helps us to perform real-time insights into SAP‘s productivity, which empowers us to provide instant and on-the-fly analysis. So we reduced run time from days into seconds; and now we can do things we never could do be before, like simulations or even prediction analysis – thus empowering our executive teams to make smarter decisions.

These are only a few examples of how we leverage Rapid Deployment Solutions at SAP and how they enable us to deliver innovation in a fast and agile way. This is a must have in a business environment that SAP is operating in, and a strategic driver for SAP‘s success. So to answer the ‘title’ question; YES! SAP does rapidly deploy SAP. Shouldn’t CIO’s everywhere follow suit? 

Click here for the complete blog series on SAP Rapid Deployment
Solutions.

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