The difference between success and failure for a digital enterprise can often be measured in seconds.

With more and more customers demanding customized products and services, and a growing expectation for immediacy in the delivery of those custom products, the acceptable response time for a digital enterprise to meet these newfound demands is shrinking. Gone are the days when a retailer could forecast inventory based on previous actuals, or a manufacturer could absorb unplanned production downtime by artificially inflating stock levels.

To meet the evolving expectations of its customers, a digital enterprise also demands lightning-quick response times from its systems. For the enterprise, immediacy, reliability, and a narrowing margin for error is expected of its infrastructure, where high availability is paramount to run application workloads that keep digital business processes humming. CorpFlex, a managed cloud infrastructure and services provider in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has seen the market transform to a digital-first landscape in the more than 20 years it has been supporting innovation initiatives of its customers.

“CorpFlex is specialized in identifying the needs of our customers and understanding how to define their digital journeys in a cloud environment,” says Diogo Barroso Santos, CorpFlex CTO. “CorpFlex identifies a customer need, defines the best environment in which to fulfill that need, and provides the end-to-end service to manage that journey in a secure and competent way.”

High Availability, Low Latency

A Brazilian industry customer of CorpFlex typified the journey that Santos describes. Needing to support a growing operation, as well as activities in factories throughout Brazil, the company installed its SAP ERP to the CorpFlex private cloud environment in 2016 because it needed a high availability and low latency computing environment that its own data center could not deliver. Like many of CorpFlex’s other customers, nearly 100 of which run SAP application workloads, the ability of this retailer to provide exemplary customer service in a digital environment was tied to the performance and availability of its ERP system.

To meet the evolving expectations of its customers, CorpFlex sought out a technology partner that could deliver on the increasing pressures for high availability and low latency, along with flexibility to scale up or down as needed. With these and other requirements that included reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and rapid deployment, CorpFlex opted for the Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure to run its customers’ mission-critical databases and critical applications
that include SAP solutions.

According to Santos, with the Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure, CorpFlex has delivered an approximate 40% performance improvement to its customers’ workloads, along with a capability to add a new node and create a new SAP environment for a customer in as little as two hours. In addition to rapid deployment capabilities and greater performance, the consolidation features of a hyperconverged environment have increased cost savings for CorpFlex, which has meant more competitive pricing for its customers and lower TCO.

The roughly 20 CorpFlex customers currently running a HyperFlex environment for their SAP applications include an automotive part retailer with a network of locations throughout Brazil, a multinational cosmetics company, and a Brazilian HVAC distributor.

“CorpFlex is one of the first Cisco HyperFlex customers in Brazil; we’ve been running the technology since 2015,” says Santos. “The system is very structured to run mission-critical systems in production, and the hyperconverged platform has been tested and approved for these mission-critical applications that our customers depend on.” (For more information about the Cisco infrastructure, see the sidebar at the end of the article.)

Options Abound

One question that keeps popping up for CorpFlex from its customers that run SAP software is what the in-memory processing power of SAP HANA and the SAP HANA platform can do to help propel the business on a digital journey and spur innovation. 

According to Santos, CorpFlex has several existing customers running SAP HANA in a managed cloud environment on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers. Of the many customer projects that involve SAP migrations, about half are considering running SAP HANA in a managed cloud.

“It’s a growing market, because these customers see that it’s a path to a consistent reduction in the cost of infrastructure and cost to support the environment,” Santos says. “It’s important to note that the customers decide on what they need in terms of memory and disc-space; perhaps they don’t need low latency to run their applications. Considering this scenario, does the customer need the low latency to run the application, or do they need more memory or storage? CorpFlex will not limit options. Customers decide what’s the best environment for each application, and both of those infrastructures are based on Cisco solutions.”

In other words, it will be a customer-by-customer technical and financial decision based on unique business needs according to each company’s digital path. CorpFlex will keep all options on the table, while also distinguishing itself with consultative services to assist customers with deciding on an optimal environment. 

This approach, Santos says, is borne from a strategic vision that was laid out by CorpFlex CEO Edivaldo Rocha when the organization decided several years ago to migrate its managed cloud environment to the Cisco platform. “The strategy is for CorpFlex to always deliver the best relationship between cost and benefits, offering cost-effective solutions to our customers based not only on technology but just as importantly on the demands of customers in terms of how they use the infrastructure,” says Rocha. “This was the key consideration; offering the best solution according to customers’ business needs.”

Partnership, Performance, Solutions

CorpFlex’s long-term strategy has held fast throughout the evolution to digital-first business processes because even before digital transformation became an enterprise buzzword, the strategy encompassed the central tenet of digital transformation: that organizations all innovate at their own pace. As such, there’s no one-size-fits-all infrastructure. With Cisco as its infrastructure partner, CorpFlex has been able to consistently deliver on its strategic vision.

“It’s in our DNA to host and manage mission-critical services; it will always be important to us to stay ahead of the market and always offer the best for our customers in terms of partnership, performance, and solutions,” says Rocha.