In our first blog, we provided an overview of the HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and introduced the services that are available for customers that ensure a smooth transition to the HEC and manage the systems once they have landed in the HEC. In this blog, we would like to dive a little deeper into the Assessment and Advisory service by providing an overview and answering some common questions about the assessment.
The assessment occurs after the customer has learned about the HEC and how it can benefit their SAP implementation by allowing them to run their applications on HANA with a short productive time to fast ROI and decided to proceed with a new installation or migration of their own. Typically the customer has seen initial pricing known as "indicative pricing" for HEC and wants to pursue moving systems to HANA or implementing new systems. The assessment is a collaborative effort between SAP HEC architects, including employees from services and operations organizations, and customer teams consisting of technical and functional resources. However, the main participants from customer side are mainly technical and often the infrastructure/basis experts. The primary goals of the assessment are to ensure that the overall solution is a proper fit for HEC, design a system landscape including infrastructure and generate an onboarding and/or migration plan.
Why do I need an HEC assessment in the first place?
The assessment is a way for both SAP and the customer to confirm final scope and generate pricing for HEC infrastructure + operations (i.e. the monthly costs) + any onboarding and migration costs if existing systems are being migrated. In addition, the assessment confirms solution fit and ensures there are no technical limitations for the overall solution in HEC.
What is the duration of the assessment?
The assessment can take many shapes and can range from a series of two hour calls in simple scenarios to a multiday onsite engagement in cases where existing complex SAP landscapes are targeted for migration to HEC.
For example, an assessment with a customer who is looking to deploy a brand new landscape in HEC to replicate a handful of tables from an ECC system to a HANA Agile Data Mart using SLT as transformation layer and business objects for reporting is usually done in 1-2 calls with a few follow up emails over the course of a week end to end. This type of assessment is much different than a customer looking to migrate an existing ECC and BW system on ANY DB to HANA that is currently live in production and probably requires an upgrade and OS/DB Migration. In the latter scenario, test cycles, custom code, user impact and consideration for downtime requirements all need to be addressed. This type assessment often requires an onsite visit in order to fully understand scope, landscape and migration requirements.
What can I expect in the workshop?
The main goal is a landscape design so you can expect questions on the solutions in scope, and they are mostly technical in nature. Software versions, database sizes, add-ons, number of users, server configurations, high availability, disaster recovery, application servers, existing SLAs, change management strategy, solution manager integration are just a few sample topics that get covered in the workshop.
What are the participants?
The participants of the workshop can vary based on scope and responsibilities but in general the technical lead and technical resources who know the SAP system landscape, server configuration, networking details and interface topology are the main participants. Team leads and process area leads also participate for overall solution design and strategy discussions.
What are the outputs of the assessment?
As a result of the workshop, a solution design is created that depicts the technical landscape and integration with existing systems. The format is usually a MS Powerpoint document and includes “As-Is” and “To-Be” diagrams and information regarding solutions, application versions, network topology, etc. In addition, pricing for the HEC monthly costs (infrastructure and operations) and Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) costs for Onboarding & Migration and Application Management Services are provided, if applicable.
Get started with HEC today: SAP.com/HEC
