The Bright side of SAP Automations in Cloud.

[gerard_christopher2]

When I was talking about the need for automation and the importance of it to a group of SAP Consultants. A question popped up which was the idea behind this blog..

The Big question was “ Would they still need me once we automate all of this ? “

Well, for a SAP consultant who does mundane tasks and not too keen on learning and growing with technology , then it’s a definite concern .

However , the ones who adapt with the new technology and who constantly want to learn and show creativity in their work ,automations can be a boon.

Today with the advent of Cloud computing , Volume has increased while the expectations around turnaround time has reduced by many folds . Thanks to “Twitter” and a whole lot of social networking tools , now information needs to be available then and there . Technology has become dynamic to an extent where turnaround time for tasks which used to take days are now in minutes.

A SAP Install which typically takes days to deliver is expected to be delivered in few minutes. Storage Provisioning which used to take days is now in minutes. Migrations which used to take days now happens in a switch. Customers pay by usage and Compute power has become elastic.

“Customer value” has been the mantra for vendors and that’s carved out of reduced downtime , more value for money and better usage of resources.

Service Providers need to find a balance, to price competitively while they offer these great services.

Automations are the cornerstone to attain the cloud value proposition of reduced cost and increased agility . Service Providers will have to make their workload management efficient, they will have to automate mundane repeated pattern of work in order to deal with the volume and the quick turnaround time that’s expected.

Increase of manpower alone may not be enough to deal with this , they will need automated processes and tools ,where a repeated pattern could be automated in less time . Service providers may have to look out to maximize their efficiency with a optimized resource pool.

A typical scenario is the SAP installations in a landscape , A Single SAP installation is usually replicated along the landscape from Sandbox to Production. In the Manual world this will be a repeated activity (at least 3 times with around 3 days each) . With Image and configuration automations, service providers are achieving this from minutes to hours .

Another example would be the repeated customer specific SAP production support task like System Copy , validations and repeated client copies..

A Seasoned SAP Basis consultant will usually consider these tasks as repeated and less challenging and will appreciate if this can be done in a click of a button . This gives him/her the bandwidth to work on other innovative and challenging tasks.

Organizations will still have to ensure that their resources get at least 20% of their bandwidth free to work on innovations and other things in the technology they are passionate about .

While Automations in cloud is definitely needed to attain the cloud economy, I think  this shift also creates a opportunity where we take boredom and Mundane tasks out of the SAP Consultants book.

The shift may pave way for creativity and improvement in the employee morale while helping the organization achieve their cloud value proposition.