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Recently HP announced new and enhanced services and solutions to help companies modernise and manage their SAP Enterprise Resource Planning environments. See the press release.
Sometimes, it can be scary to do the right thing for your company – even if you stand to gain millions.
Not long ago, the management of Austrian industrial giant OMV wanted to move from a complex IBM mainframe environment to a stable of HP Integrity servers. They just weren’t sure the company could pull it off.
“Back then, we already had more than 60 systems in use. To create a unified platform for all IT applications, we thought it would make sense to migrate SAP to Linux as well,” says Johann Ehm, head of competence centre infrastructure at OMV Solutions. “But the feasibility of this project was not ensured at the beginning. On the contrary, even large IT companies were very doubtful about the whole thing.
But for intrepid companies willing to run the numbers, the payoffs can be huge. Ehm says that HP’s plan showed management that such a platform migration was not just feasible, but it could save money on hardware and software. Lots of it.
The results have been even more dramatic than management had hoped.
“For the SAP systems alone, we now anticipate savings of 1 million euros per year,” says Ehm, who adds that much of the savings came from increased flexibility and performance and reduced maintenance.
SAP upgrades: a growing trend
OMV is part of a growing trend, as many companies update ageing ERP platforms, many of them installed in the late 1990s. “There’s a lot of urgency these days with organisations trying to consolidate and standardise their ERP platforms, and SAP ERP 6.0 is a good opportunity for them to do so” says Albert Pang, director of enterprise applications research for IDC.
Globalisation: a key driver
Globalisation is also forcing changes that make migration to the new capabilities of SAP ERP 6.0 even more attractive.
“Companies in the past maybe only needed visibility into business operations functions in one region, and on less urgent schedules,” says Pang. “Now they need the system capabilities of handling that kind of workload, as well as adding new e-commerce capabilities. The path that SAP has laid out is a path to a cleaner user interface and easier ways to manage corporate data”.
Many companies are attracted by some of the new capabilities of SAP ERP 6.0.
“Employee and manager self-service capabilities in SAP ERP 6.0 mean that companies can streamline workflow considerably,” says Pang. “It also lets you do reporting of important metrics, such as inventory replenishment and accounts payable and receivable, as well as electronic invoice presentation and payment, and documentation.”
Pleasant surprises
Some companies that initially upgrade as part of an effort to consolidate their ERP systems for cost savings find they reap unexpected benefits, according to Jean Bozman, IDC research vice president for enterprise systems.
“If you look closely at SAP deployments at many companies, different modules are often running on different platforms. One of the types of projects that companies undertake is workload consolidation. One benefit of this consolidation approach is the ability to move easily from one partition to another on scalable systems, and the ability to deploy clusters of scale-out servers to run SAP”, says Bozman.
But some companies, such as Aearo Technologies, find that the benefits of doing SAP consolidation right go far beyond cutting administration and maintenance costs. The Indianapolis, Ind., manufacturer of protective gear and communication systems recently consolidated its SAP operations around HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers.
“The project started as a cost reduction initiative” says Roman Rozman, Aearo’s senior director of information technology. “But it became a big capacity and performance improvement,” with batch processing running up to three times faster.
Optimisations pay off
And though performance increases often delight business and IT managers, such improvements are not uncommon. “HP and SAP have been working together for a long time to optimise HP servers so that SAP runs very well on HP business critical systems. SAP workloads are very important to many server buyers,” says Bozman.
Another surprise for Aearo’s Rozman was how much of a difference the high availability of HP Integrity servers, based on dual-core Itanium processors, has made. “For some customers, some of the high availability features of HP Integrity are important, such as the ability to electrically isolate partitions in the same machine, and being able to run SAP in one partition, and the database in another partition within the same system,” says IDC’s Bozman.
The drive to upgrade and consolidate around SAP 6.0 is expected to accelerate in the coming years. As IDC’s Pang puts it: “Delivery of the right information, to the right people, at the right time has become a key strategic advantage of successful companies. That’s not going to change anytime soon”.
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