Application management innovations from Enterprise Cloud Services

This blog will cover application support services available from SAP Enterprise Cloud Services and highlight how these services are evolving.  Many readers know that SAP has provided application management services or classic “AMS” for on-premise and for cloud based SAP landscapes for quite some time.  More recently SAP has transformed its internal teams and capabilities to deliver a new portfolio of cloud application services to support new types of deployments and new commercial models.  This evolution of the portfolio entails new scope and outcomes, new selling concepts and supports deployments in the SAP cloud and hyperscalers Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Azure.  SAP recognizes that customers need simplified procurement options as well as simplified consumption to attain agility and  most importantly the business outcomes they desire.  These requirements become manifest in clearly defined fixed-scope, subscription-based services that can be readily acquired and even scaled.  Today experiences such as expanding a data plan for a growing family, adding devices or adding a streaming channel are becoming ubiquitous offerings and greatly simplified.  Service providers must strive to provide similar procurement interactions not only for rapid infrastructure deployments but also for application support and other IT services.

SAP’s cloud business enjoys continued success and thus innovation teams are constantly working to elaborate the solutions and services portfolio.  Over 1500 customers are leveraging SAP Enterprise Cloud Services to support their landscapes.  Figure 1 below represents the value framework from SAP’s cloud application services portfolio which begins with foundational IaaS and rises to the delivery of a high value transformational services layer.  The “Run Infrastructure” and “Run System” layers house the essential services on top of the managed infrastructure including technical operations.  Just beyond the product support layer customers can rely on Enterprise Cloud Services to provide “Run Solution” options.  In this layer innovations include outcome-based services that are proactive, global and cover a large swath of day to day application operations.   Easy reach to SAP’s other teams and knowledge assets mean customer benefits from having these services on standby for reactive and proactive application support. Moving to the top of the diagram you find offerings that are pre-packaged or customized for testing, data management and functional support in the layer “Improve & Manage Solution”.  At the peak the framework, Enterprise Cloud Services offers customers business improvement services to help address challenges and stay informed along a transformational cloud journey.  These tailored services provide expert guidance for things like road mapping, data lifecycle management and performance tuning.

Figure 1 Solution as a Service famework

The end-to-end framework constitutes a “Solution-as-a-Service” capability offered by  SAP.  This means “one hand to shake” but also takes into account that the support ecosystem can be comprised of any number and flavor of service provider arrangements.  Your organization may have incumbent service providers delivering satisfactory services or you may maintain internal competencies for which you want to grow and mature.  In this case perhaps only partial support substitutions make sense which may free up resources to focus on key initiatives.  Perhaps take advantage of the close alignment between SAP product engineering and the regression testing package Enterprise Cloud Services can offer.  Perhaps the coordination and execution of things such as an upgrade to a major product release can be left in the capable hands of the SAP cloud application services team.

I mentioned earlier that application management services are evolving to become modular and flexible and the procurement of these services can be greatly simplified.  This simplification also includes an aspect of completeness or end-to-end coverage beginning with the infrastructure management.  SAP offerings such as RISE with SAP and the option HEC Advanced Edition include infrastructure support and go further by embedding some core technical operations support.  Layer in one or more choices from the cloud application services portfolio and a foundation for success becomes possible as pictured earlier.

Customers have choices and SAP recognizes this.  Supporting a thriving partner ecosystem is central to SAP strategy. I will discuss this in a future blog post and focus on the services arena. Maintaining a tight relationship with the company that provides and runs critical business systems in the cloud is paramount to many customers therefore the Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio is built with this in mind.