To meet the challenges and opportunities presented by big data and an accelerating pace of business, organizations recognize a pressing need to change how information is managed across the enterprise. Companies that strive to compete in a digital economy must make actionable decisions based on up-to-the-second data; running batch processes in concert with legacy transactional databases simply cannot keep pace with a business environment that demands immediacy and personalization in the delivery of goods and services.

To support end-to-end business transformation, companies are realizing the necessity of a unified infrastructure platform that provides the speed, scalability, and agility to turn insights into action. At SAP, this means running the in-memory SAP S/4HANA database as the foundation of a digital enterprise. For a cost-effective solution that offers flexibility, resources, and a rapid time to deployment, organizations are turning to a private, managed SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud environment.

In addition to the standard cloud benefits such as lower TCO, a shift to an operational expense (OPEX) model, newer hardware, and more frequent software releases, SAP customers are migrating to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud as the centerpiece of a hybrid cloud landscape for greater infrastructure control. With the right managed services, customers can improve security, governance, and auditability and experience high availability. And with the right hardware and infrastructure, customers can shed complexity even as they migrate more workloads and scale up as data volumes increase.

End-to-End Cloud Support

This is where Sungard Availability Services Application Cloud Services | SAP S/4HANA, powered by Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), sets itself apart. A virtualized SAP HANA environment with integrated hardware and services helps drive success for enterprises setting out on a digital transformation.

Minimizing the growing complexity of SAP systems, coping with ever-present security risks, and allocating the necessary resources to build out and maintain a modern digital infrastructure are a few of the primary reasons why customers are interested in consuming SAP S/4HANA in a cloud environment, and working with Sungard Availability Services and Cisco has shown to be an efficient and cost-effective way to address these concerns. An IDC survey of customers using Cisco UCS as a platform for SAP S/4HANA revealed several significant improvements, such as 48% lower IT infrastructure costs, 98% less unplanned downtime, 29% faster application development life cycles, and a five-year ROI of 528%.¹ These results are consistent with the above-industry-average performance and availability metrics that customers of Sungard Availability Services experience in conjunction with the Cisco UCS platform for SAP S/4HANA. 

Set Your Own Pace for an SAP S/4HANA Journey

For many SAP customers on the path toward becoming a digital enterprise, a hybrid approach — at least in the early stages of a cloud migration — is the logical choice; legacy systems often have customizations, built out to support unique processes, that are difficult to migrate over. Recognizing this fact, Sungard Availability Services provides a hybrid hosting model that supports hosting legacy and third-party systems and connecting these systems to an SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud environment. Additionally, with the recognition that some customers wish to run SAP S/4HANA out of their own data centers, Sungard Availability Services also offers a standalone disaster recovery solution for their SAP S/4HANA instance.

For more about how Sungard Availability Services can deliver a cost-effective, hybrid SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud environment with a simplified landscape and end-to-end services, visit www.sungardas.com/Partners/strategic/Cisco/sap-hana/Pages/The-Move-to-SAP-HANA-Is-On.aspx.

^{1 IDC, “The Business Value of Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure Solutions for Running SAP Workloads” (March 2016; bit.ly/BusinessValueofCisco). [back]}