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SAP HANA for Enterprise Architects – Implications of Introducing SAP HANA into Your Environment

Former Member
‎10-31-2015 1:56 AM

The Journey Continues - Episode 9 of 10

Throughout this webcast series we have been learning about both technical and non-technical aspects of SAP HANA for Enterprise Architects. In this latest installment, the speakers were able to blend both in an informative and engaging presentation on what SAP HANA means in the age of the Digital Economy. The webcast speakers from SAP were, Phil Davies, Global Head – Enterprise Architecture and Simon Townson, Chief Transformation Architect, both heavy hitters in the world of SAP.

This tag-team presentation covered some overall reasoning for Enterprise Architects and where SAP HANA fits in, and then moved on to discuss options to simplify the SAP landscape environment. The three main points they made with their presentation are summed up from their slide 5:

  1. In assessing SAP scenarios for your environment, it’s essential you look at the wider brief from the business needs and transformation
  2. You will need to refresh you IT roadmap in order to achieve your business and IT strategy
  3. Ensure your plans support business agility and don’t miss the opportunity to simplify your landscape.

I really liked the statement Phil made: “The role of the Enterprise Architect is more critical than ever in achieving efficiency or transformation goals”. He backed this up with a slide where he quoted Gartner on the changing role of Enterprise Architects in working more to support “Digital Business”, “Business Outcomes” and “Innovating the technology Core”.

All images © 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the authors.

With this backdrop of reasoning as to why EA’s need to look at their environment, what the business is doing and how they can impact the business, Simon took over and dove into to the concepts of simplification and landscape changes that can have a positive impact on the business.

In this section of the webinar the justification of implementing SAP HANA was done with some example TCO saving:

See the webcast for more details on the TCO savings from both an IT cost reduction to a People Productivity increase. In the current economy, companies are challenged to show real cost reductions not just from IT. For Enterprise Architects this means looking at different Application patterns and deployment patterns which are covered in the webcast. A large part of the presentation was dedicated to reviewing some best practices that illustrate this change in thinking. There were five points reviewed as best practices:

See the webcast for more details on each of these best practice topics.

So to summarize what I took away from the landscape simplification part of the presentation included the following:

  1. You should rethink how you have your landscapes deployed and what this might look like deployed on SAP HANA. – Look for ways to simplify.
  2. As an EA, you have to be able to paint a picture that shows value to the business for changing the environment
  3. Do changes in a way that makes sense to the business and a schedule that they can afford.
  4. There are new scenarios for you to consider that include the cloud and hybrid deployments of technology and that you need to be familiar with the options.

Where I think many companies get stuck is how to prioritize and plan out a roadmap on how they could actually make these changes happen. Phil and Simon did a great job of going through examples of working through the steps to map out the planning process:

They also rounded out the conversation by summarizing some best practices you should consider as part of the migration planning process:

This webcast was a great follow on to the previous one by Mike Bell, and extended some of the business reasoning on what SAP HANA can do for any organization. Simplification is something that can be accomplished, having real business impact. There were many slides detailing the concepts of simplification and landscape migration strategies so you will want to download the deck or watch the presentation for the details.

Key Takeaways from Listeners:

  • Look forward to reviewing the materials. The opportunities to consolidate infrastructure are important and this S/4HANA milestone should enable and provide tools to get projects away from customizations and making a significant step toward standard.
  • Evaluate business drivers for HANA upgrades
  • Simplifying the landscape, reducing the amount of data and lowering costs
  • I will use some of the references to look into the deployment pattern options. The planning approach overview was also useful.
  • Non production landscape simplification
  • HANA has moved on far faster than our team thought. I will be meeting with our senior Architect and reporting what I learned today, thanks.
  • Need to look at simplifying our environment with HANA
  • The role of the SAP EA is changing – need more skills

Online Playback: http://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1018971/7119750FB216B02E4C6B0B9D28ED6523

Webcast Materials on ASUG.com: https://www.asug.com/discussions/docs/DOC-42445

The final webcast in this series for Enterprise Architects was presented on October 13th , the speaker covered “Internet of Things and SAP HANA for Business”

Complete Webcast Series Details https://www.asug.com/hana-for-ea

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