RISE with SAP: A move towards net zero

T-Systems and SAP have been playing important roles in helping companies achieve their climate targets. SAP has recognized the business potential that sustainability provides and is now offering software solutions designed to help businesses determine and improve their product footprints. New solutions such as RISE with SAP can also be included in your sustainability strategy, because cloud computing is usually more sustainable than on-premise operations. RISE with SAP simplifies your move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. This all-in-one service package streamlines the process and equips your business with the tools and expertise needed for a successful cloud journey. Since January 2024, T-Systems has been supporting companies in their cloud journey as a global Premium Supplier for RISE with SAP. We offer end-to-end SAP services on the T-Systems’ Private Cloud and on hyperscalers.

Moving SAP workloads to the cloud plays a vital role for a company’s sustainability strategy. The fact remains that the on-premises operation of SAP systems can never achieve the same efficiency and economies of scale as professional operations in the cloud. The cloud’s scalability enables resources to be optimally tailored to current operations. Smart capacity usage and intelligent cooling concepts allow for further synergies. Together with the reduced memory requirements of modern SAP S/4HANA systems, server capacities can be freed up by up to 75 percent, meaning a clear reduction in the energy used, and therefore in carbon emissions.

The deployment model actually does not play a crucial role. It is much more important, how the data centers behind it operate, and whether they are managed intelligently. The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) value, that is the ratio between energy used for pure processing power and the total energy used by the data center, is one of the key sustainability parameters here, along with the sources of the power used.

T-Systems has been powering its data centers with 100% renewable electricity for many years. With their LEED Gold certifications, our data centers, such as the one in Biere near Magdeburg in Germany, are among the most modern and energy-efficient data centers in Europe with a PUE of 1.3. Moving SAP workloads to our private cloud thus clearly reduces the carbon footprint and powers sustainability initiatives. This is one of the reasons we’ve been awarded the Green Magenta label. The label is a token granted by Deutsche Telekom to verifiable sustainable products and services; the certification process of which is comparable to awarding external certificates such as the Climate Neutral Data Center and LEED. On average, our customers are saving eight tons of CO2 per SAP system each year.

When you terminate your own operations, the carbon-footprint responsibility shifts onto the service provider, who must also prove that they have cut down emissions. But moving to the cloud is, of course, only one basis for sustainability and serves to improve IT’s carbon footprint. User companies will not be able to avoid setting up their own reporting and management systems for sustainability and monitoring their entire value chain in order to operate in a truly sustainable manner.

If a lot of data and processes are already being provided in the SAP systems, or are generated in SAP-controlled business operations, why shouldn’t you use this opportunity to utilize the information for sustainability aspects, enterprise-wide? SAP offers a suite of sustainability solutions, designed to help assess ESG relevant data, report them according to legal requirements, and act to improve the environmental footprint. In short, SAP can be a potent tool to empower corporates to envisage their own end-to-end sustainability strategies.

Our end-to-end SAP services include consulting, SAP S/4HANA migration, monitoring, implementation, application management and green operation of SAP systems on private cloud and hyperscalers. Being a RISE with SAP Premium Supplier, we also support customers from all industries using RISE with SAP on our own private cloud as well as on hyperscalers. Our 2,500+ SAP certified experts will guide customers through their SAP landscape migration and take care of their SAP systems’ needs to ensure the business takes a leap forward to become an intelligent and sustainable enterprise.