On-Demand Webinar: SAP Infrastructure and Landscape Trends
Meet the Experts
Key Takeaways
⇨ Learn about the major drivers for SAP infrastructure today
⇨ Understand what is behind the choices that organizations are making
⇨ Understand the timeline for infrastructure changes
SAP Infrastructure and Landscape Trends Transcript
Speaker: Robert Holland, VP of Research (00:02):
Hello, and welcome to today’s webinar, SAP Infrastructure and Landscape Trends hosted by SAP Insider and presented by Microsoft Azure, NetApp, SSA and T Systems. I’m Robert Holland from SAP Insider. Just a few announcements before you begin. This is an interactive webinar. Uh, so we will be hosting a q and a session at the end, of the webinar. So if you do have a question, please feel free to, uh, jump into, I think it’s just chat for this particular webinar. But, uh, post your question in there, um, we’ll get to as many as we can. Uh, as time permits, um, you will be able to download a copy of today’s presentation, uh, after the work, uh, after the e, after the, um, webinar is complete, you receive an email message that gives you a link to that presentation and to access the webinar on demand. Um, so on to today’s topic.
(01:05):
Uh, so this is a, uh, a research presentation. We’re talking about the SAP infrastructure and Landscape Trends research report, which we published at the end of August, um, couple of months back. Um, for those of you who are familiar with SAP Insider Research, um, we’ll start off with a bit of an overview, uh, of the project. We’ll do a survey snapshot. Uh, we’ll go through our DART methodology, uh, and then we’ll talk about, uh, recommendations. Um, now we focus this particular research on members of IT and those involved with SAP systems, uh, and infrastructure at organizations that are part of the SAP Insider community. So we are very much talking to organizations about, uh, their current and planned infrastructure, uh, and if they’re making changes, what sort of infrastructure they’re looking at, uh, and what we are really trying to determine is what their current infrastructure looks like, where their SAP workloads are running, um, what plans they might have for changing that infrastructure at the timeline for that change, um, and how they’re gonna measure the success of those initiatives.
(02:22):
So, um, we conducted our research between July and August of 2020. Um, there were 120 members of the community that responded to the research. Uh, did talk to several of them, um, after the, uh, report was, uh, or the, the, the re the survey was complete. Uh, we conducted post survey interviews with a number of them. Um, as you can see, uh, the, the respondents were split, uh, relatively close between North and North America and amea, uh, with 36% of respondents coming from North America. Uh, about a third, uh, coming from amea. Um, nearly a quarter of respondents for this particular research came from the APJ region. Uh, and then about 8% were from Latin America. And in terms of what roles these respondents had in their organizations, a quarter were from IT management. Um, 14% were from either the SAP team, uh, within, uh, it or maybe IT operations.
(03:29):
Um, about 10% were from a basis or administration team for their SAP systems. Um, 9% were from a, a business development or sales background, 7% finance and accounting, um, 5% systems, sorry, systems implementation and integration, uh, about the same number from application development. But we also had respondents from manufacturing and production, uh, from GRC or from other areas, uh, inside the organization. Uh, in terms of what industry the respondents came from, uh, very close in terms of the two largest respondent groups. Uh, software and technology made up a quarter of the respondents. And just slightly less from that than that. 24% made up the industrial, those from the industrial sector, which includes manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and natural resources. Um, 13% were from healthcare and life sciences. Um, 10% were from the public sector. Uh, 9% were from hospitality, transportation, and travel retail distribution. And consumer package goods was also another 9% financial services and insurance, 6%. And then we had a few respondents from the media and entertainment sector.
(04:49):
So, uh, talking about, you know, the first thing we really tried to understand is SAP workloads. Uh, what SAP workloads organizations are running, and then where those workloads were running. Um, so as you can see, um, about close to half the respondents said that their, they were running SAPs for ha. Now, we did ask the question, are you running or implementing? Um, the research that we’ve sort of done earlier this year shows that about, um, between 25 and 30% of respondents are already running SAPs for ha. Now, this does not necessarily mean that that is the only, uh, ERP system that they have in their organization. Um, but there’s 44% there was running or implementing. So with about 15 or so percent, uh, currently implementing in, in research we’ve done earlier this year in, in a for deployment or S four migration, uh, reports, um, that sort of works out pretty much with what we’ve seen.
(05:53):
Um, and between that and the number of respondents who said that they’re running SAP ECC or Business Suite, um, I think it worked out to be about 75% of the respondents, maybe a little lower than that, 72%. Um, were running an SAP enterprise ER p system, uh, either ecc, business Suite ORs for ha. So it, it worked out to be a little less than those two numbers combined, uh, largely because I think some people are, have an overlap still. Like, you know, if you’re implementing SAP for ha, you’re s for ha, you’re probably still running something like ECC or Business Suite. Um, but I mean, other workloads that you can see people running included financial management data and analytics. You know, for example, um, solutions like, uh, Bob J Business Intelligence, um, maybe, you know, uh, BW or BW for HANA made up a third of respondents, um, people were running HR solutions crm.
(06:59):
Um, about a third were running the business technology platform. And I think, uh, if I remember looking at the data, then the vast majority of those running business technology platform were also running PS for ha, um, GRC and cybersecurity Solutions Planning and Analysis. So there was a wide range of SAP workloads, uh, that people were running. Um, relatively small number were either running or implementing Rise with sap, um, SAP hana. Uh, actually most of those were not necessarily running, were were, some of those were runnings for hana, but, but people also were running HANA as a separate, uh, a separate database in terms of what infrastructure those workloads were running on. Um, as you can see, the, the, the workloads that were most likely to be running on internal infrastructure, um, were SAP ECC or Business Suite, uh, or older supply chain management solutions, financial management solutions, even SAP hana.
(08:12):
Uh, particularly organizations that might have, uh, implemented hana, um, sometime after its initial release in 2011, uh, might potentially be running that on premise. Um, whereas those workloads that were most likely to be running on a hyperscaler, uh, environment, uh, the business technology platform rise with sap. Uh, you will notice that, uh, uh, about a quarter of the rise with SAP respondents were saying they were using a managed environment on premise. This is most likely through, um, uh, rise with sap, yes, for HANA Cloud private edition customer data center option, uh, which is a way of running rise with SAP using a vendor like HPE GreenLake, Lenova True Scale or Dell Apex, um, where there is a operational expenditure environment that is inside, um, that is running inside your own data center. Um, so, uh, that’s why there’s a, there is a, a number of the, the RISE respondents who are in an on premise environment, but it is not a, it’s not a typical on premise environment, um, because the, the, the organization does not have, it does not administer that environment themselves.
(09:35):
It’s actually administered by, um, HPE or whoever the vendor is in conjunction with sap. So it really is like a cloud environment that’s sitting in your own data center. Um, but I mean, what we can see is, is older potential, typically older solutions a most likely to be on internal infrastructure. Whereas, um, newer solutions like asset for s for hana, uh, spend management, um, btp, uh, because it is a cloud-based solution, these are the most likely to be running in the cloud now. Um, what we did then ask is sort of try and understand from people how likely is it given that, you know, and we asked this of only of people who said that they were running, um, their SAP workloads on an internal infrastructure. We asked how likely it was that they would be moving those SAP workloads off internally managed infrastructure as they update their landscape.
(10:40):
Um, and as you can say, uh, see vast, you know, more than nearly three quarters of the respondent said that it’s at least, um, you know, they’re not sure. That’s about a quarter. Uh, and nearly a half said that it’s, it’s either at least somewhat likely, um, or 20 and 20% were saying it’s very likely, which is a much greater number than those who are, um, only 26% said that it’s, it’s at least, uh, it’s unlikely or very unlikely to wanna move that infrastructure off an internal, um, or move off internally managed infrastructure as they update their landscape. So most people are looking at some sort of non-internal infrastructure as they update their landscape. Now, you know, as we can see, um, I mean, if we look at, you know, what sort of infrastructure organizations are planning on using as they update their landscape, um, it’s a combination of things.
(11:45):
It’s not ne that doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, the fact that they’re moving off internal infrastructure does not necessarily mean that they’re all going to public cloud or a hyperscaler or, you know, some combination of that. The most likely would be a private cloud or a hosting company. Now that could be, uh, a company like, uh, Nutanix Virtue Stream T Systems that offers, um, hyper-converged infrastructure, uh, does infrastructure managed infrastructure for you. It could be, um, just a hosting company that, uh, you’ve been running other workloads on. Um, but the big change this year from the last time I did this research, uh, or asked a similar sort of question, probably about two years ago now, is that the last time we asked a similar question, new on premise infrastructure was the second most likely choice, and it was right behind a private cloud or hosting company.
(12:41):
Uh, now as you can see, the difference is multitenant hyperscaler or public cloud is the most likely second choice. Now, they’re not, that doesn’t mean they’re, that someone is necessarily thinking about software as a service. They could be thinking as of an infrastructure, as a service environment that’s hosted on a hyperscaler, but that’s definitely a shift over the last couple of years in terms of what infrastructure people are looking at as they plan on updating their landscape. Now, the other thing to really note here is that there’s quite a few options that are a combination. So a combination of local and private cloud, a combination of private cloud and hyperscaler, a combination of local and hyperscaler. This is where the organization continues to run some workloads on premise, um, and other workloads in the cloud, um, or in that other environment, private cloud, public cloud, um, hyper, you know, um, uh, hyperscaler.
(13:47):
Um, so the, the big difference that that, and, and sometimes when they do that, they might not even be running different workloads in different places. Like, for example, maybe they’re running an ERP system on premise and, uh, you know, something like a success factor is in the cloud. They might even just be running separate instances of a particular solution in a combination of environments. So, you know, for example, they might be running their dev and test instances of a solution like SAPs for ha on premise and the production instance in the cloud. Or it could be the other way around. Maybe they’re running dev and test in the cloud and their production on premise. Um, so this, you know, but this combination is much more likely now than it has been in the past as well. Um, the one big thing here is managed infrastructure from SAP is also a, uh, a very interesting, or at least a popular relatively popular choice with nearly a quarter of the respondents saying that was an option for them.
(15:00):
Um, showing that, you know, SAP heck, or maybe at least in the interim, some sort of, uh, infrastructure in rise with sap, although primarily that’s not how SAP is positioning that solution, um, you know, is a possibility for them. So in terms of, you know, organizations thinking about when they’re updating their landscape, uh, we ask people, what’s the timeline for making that happen? When, when do you think that’s that, that that is going to, uh, that is going to actually happen? And the answer is, uh, for only a small percentage of respondents, 7%, it’s done. Um, the vast majority still have work to do. Some, you know, about 10% said it, it’s, it’s in process, uh, slightly more said it’s within the next year. Um, but for the vast majority of respondents, um, you know, 50% nearly, um, it’s either one to two years out or more than two years out before this infrastructure changes happens.
(16:04):
And nearly a quarter are saying, well, you know, I’m gonna coordinate that infrastructure change with a move to SAPs for ha. Um, given that SAPs for HA is a significant project from many organizations, um, it makes sense that people would want to, you know, uh, correlate that move to SAPs for HA or coordinate that move to SAPs for HA with an infrastructure change that happens at the same time, you’re implementing your new ER p system, you’re putting it into a new landscape, you’re not putting it into an existing landscape. Uh, you’re updating the infrastructure for that new system. And then as you potentially, um, turn off your older environment, you can decrement that hardware, you can decrement that infrastructure, and you can, uh, you can then potentially, um, you know, just be running on that new infrastructure.
(17:01):
Uh, in terms of how people plan to measure their success of their infrastructure and landscape, uh, initiatives, um, the number one thing that they’re looking to do is reduce cost. Um, measuring the success is, oh, reducing cost is one of the biggest factors for infrastructure change as we’ll see when we get into our dart. Um, but that’s also the primary way that people will measure the success of their infrastructure initiatives, right? It’s not just a matter of implementing a new infrastructure that will potentially save the money. They really wanna reduce operational costs, the costs of operating that environment. Um, but at the same time, the next biggest choice is they want to improve security, and they want to have increased scalability and flexibility. Now, increased scalability and flexibility is some of, is, uh, something that is essentially a sort of a standard for, uh, organizations considering a cloud-based deployment.
(18:05):
You know, that’s, that’s really what they’re looking to achieve. They want to have increased scalability and flexibility, uh, in what they’re doing. They want to have an environment that can scale to meet their needs, um, particularly at things like period close, where you, you’re gonna have more users accessing the system. You wanna make sure that, um, you’re able to scale to meet that workload, but you also wanna have flexibility if you wanna spin up a new system quickly, if you wanna turn something off, if it’s not currently in use. That’s the sort of thing that traditional on premise infrastructure does not necessarily offer. Um, and something like a cloud, uh, landscape can potentially, um, be beneficial with, right? You can add processing capability, you can add memory, um, you know, when you wanna do so. Um, so then, uh, you can, um, and you can take that off when you don’t need it anymore, and you don’t necessarily have to pay for it when you’re not using it.
(19:12):
Um, but security is also important because I think we’ve seen a significant increase in ransomware attacks, malware attacks, you know, people as they put infrastructure in place, they want it to be secure from the beginning. It’s not just a matter of putting a system in place and then adding security solutions that work with that. They want to have, um, uh, a, uh, a secure environment from the starting point. Um, other benefits that people are, are looking for are improved user experience. You know, they want the users to have, for example, faster performance, reduced management administration. Uh, one of the key ways in which organizations are looking to, um, save money, uh, from the infrastructure initiatives is, is to reduce the administrative overhead. I mean, if I can, uh, implement the environment that allows me to reassign, um, uh, you know, members of my IT team to other tasks, then, um, that will potentially cost me less over time. Um, but also a newer system is often, uh, cheaper to manage cheaper to, cheaper to administer because it requires, uh, less, you know, interaction over time, um, or less, uh, manual intervention than an older system might. Um, they want improved uptime, minimized operational inefficiencies, reduced deployment timelines, improved utilization, you know, these are all ways that organizations are looking to measure the success of their landscape initiatives.
(20:53):
Um, now looking then at, um, you know, when people are implementing new infrastructure, how important, and this is what the, this is the question we asked. How important to your organization is it that you create a more sustainable infrastructure and landscape with a reduced environmental impact? Um, with many organizations today, it’s critical that the organization reduce its overall environmental impact. Sap, for example, when they have their quarterly earnings calls, they talk about their carbon emissions, they talk about their environmental impact, and some of the software that SAP is now shipping is focused on that sustainability. Many organizations are now tracking that same sort of metric to see how they can reduce or at least maintain, uh, the environmental impact that the, the organization is having. So from an infrastructure perspective, obviously, as you can see from looking at this chart, for only a very small proportion of the respondents, it really wasn’t important.
(22:10):
Uh, only 12% said it was somewhat important or not important. The vast majority of respondents said that it was at least, uh, moderately important, and for more than 50% it was important or very important that their organization created more sustainable infrastructure with a reduced environmental impact. And this is something that some of the cloud providers have been looking to do as they create their cloud environments. It’s, it’s having a reduced environmental impact. Um, all of the providers are sort of tracking that information in a different way, shape, or form, but it allows organizations to understand the environmental impact that their infrastructure and landscape is having.
(22:59):
So given that it is very much a touch point with SAP customers these days, uh, it’s something that SAP is pushing constantly rise with sap. We wanted to understand how much impact rise with SAP is having on people’s plans for updating or replacing their infrastructure. And as you can see from the respondents here, for the most part, not much impact. Um, more than half the respondents said it was only a minor at most, a minor impact on what they were planning, and only 7% said it was a major impact. Um, it could be that those organizations are looking to, um, are their infrastructure plans based on potentially implementing rice with sap. It could be that these organizations are delaying plans as they move to rice with sap, but the fact that only 18% said that it was a significant or major impact does show that rise with sap, while SAP has been pushing it pretty hard over the last year or so, really isn’t having a significant impact yet on organization’s infrastructure plans.
(24:23):
Um, so just a few extra points, uh, that we are sort of thinking about here from it, an executive summary. Uh, we saw that respondents were kind of split over how important SAP’s intelligent enterprise or in intelligence sustainable enterprise as SAP is now sometimes calling it, is to the, their infrastructure planning basically with almost a third each way saying it was either of low importance, moderate importance, or high importance. Uh, so definitely organizations were undecided about the impact of that and whether that’s something that they’re trying to achieve in their organization or whether that’s simply something that they’re aware of and perhaps still doing their own thing. Um, but on the other hand, as we saw, 57% of respondents said it’s very important their organization have a more sustainable infrastructure in general. Uh, and a relatively large proportion of respondents said that rise with SAP wasn’t having a big impact on their infrastructure plans.
(25:39):
So what do we sort of recommend as, uh, an organization that is potentially thinking about infrastructure change? What should you do? Um, in the beginning, start planning for infrastructure changes at the same time you plan your software changes? As I’ve said, the most common time to update infrastructure is when the software running on their infrastructure is being updated. For example, if you’re running ancp e r P system that you originally deployed 10 or more years ago, many of those people are now looking to update those systems to SAPs for HANA or moving onto a new landscape to extend the longevity of their existing systems. Coordinating your infrastructure, planning with your system update plans will allow you to ensure a smoother transition to the new infrastructure. Second, educate your teams with the skills needed to ensure a successful move ahead of the planned infrastructure change. Only a small proportion of respondents 9% said their plans for updating or replacing infrastructure were currently in process.
(26:47):
While 11% said it was planned within the next year, but for the nearly three quarters who said their plans are more than a year out, now is the time to start educating your teams with the skills they’ll need to build and innovate on your new infrastructure. It might be learning about a new operating system. For example, if you’re moving to SAPs for hana, then you’re going to have Linux in the picture, even if you hadn’t had it before. You might need different programming schools if skills. If you’re looking to deploy cloud-based applications, you might need knowledge of databases. There’s many other possibilities. But if you’re going to fully leverage your new platforms, your teams need to be sped up, up to speed, rather, before the infrastructure stu, uh, infrastructure update happens.
(27:36):
Determine your plans for older SAP solutions and when you’re gonna move them to new or updated infrastructure. So the most likely solutions to be running on internal infrastructure, as we saw were older, e r P solutions, supply chain management, financial management or crm and customer and experience solutions. But if you’re running SAP E C C, then there haven’t been any major functionality changes since SAPs for HANA was released in 2015. That means that eventually you’re gonna need to decide about your future er p solution. Some organizations are doing a lift and shift to the cloud to maximize the lifespan of what they have right now. But while that may provide flexibility in the short term, you should start planning for the timeline for broader change, and that has to be part of your infrastructure plans. And lastly, focus on when and where the cloud will have an impact on your organization’s infrastructure and landscape.
(28:38):
The choices that were top of the list for planned infrastructure were private cloud or multi 10 and hyperscalers more than a third of respondents plan on those using those environments for the infrastructure updates and others planning on hybrid landscapes, single 10 and hyperscaler, or even managed infrastructure from sap. It’s only gonna be a matter of time before more of your infrastructure or more of your landscape moves to the cloud. This could start with solutions like SAP success factors and SAP Concur, but eventually more workloads will be running in the cloud, and you need to be prepared for that. Ensure that you put a plan in place that will help manage that cloud adoption. So what we’re gonna do is move into our DART methodology. Um, many of you may be familiar with this. Uh, the DART basically is an acronym that stands for drivers actions requirements and technologies.
(29:33):
Drivers are the macro level events that are impacting an organization. They could be internal, they could be external, but they require the implementation of strategic plans. People, processes and systems actions are the strategies that companies are implementing to address the drivers. So, uh, that impacting the business. That includes the integration of people, process, and technology. Uh, requirements are the, um, business process and people requirements that need to, that are needed to support the strategies. And then technologies are the technologies and systems related requirements that enable the business requirements and support the overall strategies that the company is taking.
(30:22):
So as you can see for this particular research, those were the top drivers actions, requirements and technologies. And now I’m gonna go through those, um, and talk a little bit more about each of them as we do. So from a driver’s perspective, the top driver was really reducing costs and simplifying it. Um, you know, we saw that in the fact that cost is one of the biggest factors that people want to use to measure the success of their infrastructure initiatives. Um, and that’s really born out here in the fact that infrastructure changes are pretty much happening because there is a pressure to modernize infrastructure, to reduce costs and simplify an IT landscape. Organizations need to do that because they’ve got old systems running on old infrastructure and they need to modernize that, and they need to modernize that so that they can reduce the costs and they can simplify the management and administration of their landscape.
(31:27):
There’s also a requirement for cloud deployments to support digital transformation objectives. Transformation and innovation are key to what many organizations are doing and planning over the coming years, and that can involve both business and process transformation. So you might be transforming the business the way the business works, but you also might be transforming the processes, um, that your organization is using. Many organizations are using, uh, many existing SAP customers, for example, are using systems that were originally deployed 10 or more years ago. And the organization has changed significantly over the last 10 years. And not only has the organization changed, new government requirements have come into play new, um, compliance needs for data, uh, data residency where you’re storing your data. There’s a lot of changes that have happened, and existing systems may not have the capabilities to support those new changes. So although the business may be running very differently now than when the system was initially deployed, now organizations have been able to use customizations in SAP systems, for example, to get what they need from those systems and to match that, which is one of the, the strengths that SAP has always had, taking an implementation and tailoring it to your needs.
(33:05):
But if you’re going to transform, if you’re going to transform the organization, if you’re gonna have those digital transformation executives, uh, objectives, moving to the cloud is often a way that organizations are doing that. Um, and you need to be ready for that. But that’s also a big driver for infrastructure change. Uh, more flexibility and scalability. Organizations are saying that they need more flexibility and scalability in their enterprise infrastructure. This is something I’ve spoken to many customers about in the past. Their ERP system performs great most of the time, but at period close, for example, month end, it takes hours and hours or significantly longer to do tasks that would otherwise run relatively quickly the rest of the time. And that’s because more people are in the system looking at data, utilizing the system. They need flexibility in that infrastructure so that more processing capability can be added when it needs to be there.
(34:13):
Um, sorry, that’s scalability, not flexibility, but they also want flexibility because they wanna spin up new environments, shut them down. You want to test something, you want to have a a QA environment, you need more flexibility in your existing infrastructure. And if you have to go and acquire new hardware, for example, if you’re using, um, a traditional on-premise environment, then it can take time. Uh, and many vendors, uh, have been struggling because of supply chain concerns because of chip shortages. They haven’t necessarily been able to provide the hardware in a timely manner. So organizations need more flexibility and more scalability in the infrastructure that they have. And then lastly, the main driver for the last main driver for infrastructure change is around improved resilience. Organizations need new infrastructure that improves resilience and availability. Now, we’ve seen a lot over the last couple of years with firstly starting with the global pandemic when a lot of organizations had employees working from home in a way that they, from environments they’d never worked from before.
(35:30):
There was an increased demand for resilience. People weren’t in the office, they were potentially consuming some of that information at a different time than they might have been in the past. Systems need to be up, they can’t afford to be down. IT people might have been coming in the office once in a while to do maintenance and administration on systems, but they weren’t necessarily there either. And I think that this has really continued with the supply chain crisis. Organizations need to be able to gain insight into what’s happening in the company’s supply chain at an instant, and it could be any time of the day or night. This requires resilience and availability. So we talked a little bit about what’s driving infrastructure change. What are the actions that people are taking? Well, the first action they’re doing is improving infrastructure, usage and efficiency by using virtualization or hyperconverged infrastructure.
(36:28):
Now this is something that you can do with your existing infrastructure on premise. Um, you probably have some servers that are highly utilized and some that are largely idle. Um, putting in place virtualization. Uh, working with a provider that will provide some sort of hyper-converged infrastructure will help you better utilize the infrastructure you have today and get the most out of it. But that’s not the only thing that they’re doing. They’re also architecting new systems to providing proved customer experience and insight on usage. So they’re putting in place new systems to provide a better experience for their end users or potentially for the customers, but also gives them insight on how people are using those systems. So the first one, improving infrastructure usage really speaks to that cost, right? I want to get the most out of my existing environment without spending a lot of extra money. The second is gives you a newer environment with better performance that will help you, will give you the the scalability you need to improve your user experience.
(37:52):
Thirdly, um, they’re redesigning IT platforms to allow for faster deployment of systems and software. Uh, one of the things that I sort of talked about previously with flexibility is the ability to spin up a new environment very quickly. This is one of the advantages, um, that organizations have seen with the cloud, which is where they can take their existing environment and spin up a new uh, server, spin up a new instance very quickly that then allows them to deploy something, test something in a matter of hours that might otherwise have taken days or even weeks to do. Um, so faster deployment of systems is very important to, or having infrastructure that supports a faster deployment of systems is very important to the way organizations are thinking about infrastructure. Of course, you also have to be aware of shadow IT where someone is spinning up a new system and putting data into it that it isn’t aware of. And the last thing is, organizations are replacing all the infrastructure with updated technology in the cloud. And this is where we can, we sort of saw the two most likely infrastructures that people are gonna be using as they update their infrastructure are private cloud or multi-tenant public cloud. They’re putting, replacing their older infrastructure and putting their workloads in new technology that’s running in the cloud.
(39:34):
So what are the recommendations that we would make or the key takeaways based on, uh, what we’ve just been talking about from a driver’s and actions perspective? First, determine what infrastructure will address your scalability, flexibility, and resilience challenges while meeting your cost parameters. Meeting all those can be a different and difficult challenge, and often a different challenges and requirements can be a complex task for any single infrastructure choice. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what primary infrastructure you’re planning on implementing, there are other environments in their landscape mix. For example, 38% of those planning new on-premise infrastructure are also planning on using private cloud. And 31% are planning on using a combination of on premise and private cloud environments. So something similar is the case for those primarily planning to use multitenant hyperscaler environments. But as you explore the different infrastructure choices, you need to carefully evaluate the costs of those options because it may well be that a combination of landscapes will help you provide the flexibility, scalability, and resilience you need while meeting the budget challenges that you have.
(40:53):
Second, ensure that your landscape choices will provide a foundation for future plans for transformation. The most common type of transformation occurring today is that of infrastructure transformation, replacing legacy infrastructure with new, flexible and highly performant environments. But almost as important to that a business model and process redesign. These types of transformation can offer more benefit to the business in the long term, but require a significant investment in the short term as team members evaluate, update, and even redesign business models, whatever infrastructure choices you make, ensure that they’re providing a platform for that business transformation. So that will occur in the future as you update and redesign processes to meet changing customer needs and expectation and provide a better customer experience. Then lastly, focus on improving the usage of your existing infrastructure as you plan for future infrastructure changes. So the most important strategies selected by respondents was that of improving infrastructure, usage and efficiency by using virtualization or hyperconverged infrastructure. This strategy can allow organizations to better utilize their existing landscapes without having to make new infrastructure purchases. Virtualization solutions can now span large server clusters and make it possible to provide additional flexibility and scalability to critical solutions when that is needed. By spreading the workload across multiple physical environments. Um, being able to implement this type of environment might mean that more costly infrastructure investment can be delayed, allowing for more time to evaluate what will be the best possible solution instead of just the most convenient solution.
(42:36):
So we talked about what’s driving. We talked about what actions or strategies organizations are putting in place. What are the requirements they have to meet? The first is they need to have high performing and secure infrastructure and operating systems. The infrastructure they’re putting in place must be performant. That seems like a sort of a no-brainer when it comes to this sort of conversation. You’re not gonna want to put in place infrastructure that isn’t high performing and and secure, but I think that that security particularly is a big factor in the decisions that people are making. Um, they want operating system configurations that reduce downtime. This speaks to the resilience and availability that we talked about a little bit earlier. When you put in place new infrastructure, you want to have operating system configurations that reduce downtime.
(43:38):
Organizations also require maximized infrastructure from minimized cost. This really supports that strategy of utilization. Let’s utilize the best we possibly can. Our existing infrastructure. You wanna have the most, the most bang for the buck when it comes to infrastructure. Now that might mean you’re using a combination of things. It might mean you’re using, you know, you’re looking at the cloud. Uh, there’s different ways that you might achieve this goal, but that’s really the requirement that organizations have. The last is a flexibility to scale systems to meet increased needs. Now this is important for organizations because you wanna have flexibility in what you’re doing so that as needs change over time, you can then support those increased needs. Uh, and then lastly, the last requirement that organizations had is moving SAP workloads to updated and high performing infrastructure. So this is not only about maximizing your infrastructure, it’s about ensuring that your SAP workloads are on the best performing infrastructure.
(44:54):
So from a technology’s perspective, what are people using? So today, um, and there are three ways that we look at the technologies. We look at what people are using, we look at what people are implementing, and we look at what people are evaluating. So the most commonly used technology today, uh, cloud-based infrastructure and high availability solutions. This is relatively closely followed by infrastructure as a service virtualization and hyper-converged infrastructure, right? This is where you get the better utilization of the services that you have. But cloud-based infrastructure, the vast majority of a lot of organizations are running using cloud-based infrastructure, not necessarily for their SAP workloads, but that is, uh, trends. Uh, it is trending that way. Um, and I think that that’s, uh, that’s an option for many organizations. High availability gives you that resilience and, uh, availability that you need. Um, infrastructure as a service is probably hand in hand with a lot of that cloud based infrastructure, whether that’s private or public cloud.
(46:06):
But virtualization, as I said, gives you that utilization of what you have. Um, you know, we can see that people are leveraging hardware and operating system OP optimized for SAP hana. That’s important because, excuse me, HANA is the underlying database behind pretty much everything that SAP is doing these days. Not just SAPs for hana, but there’s BW for hana, uh, and many SAP systems are now running HANA on the back end, even if you’re not necessarily seeing it. I mean, a lot of SAP’s cloud systems have already switched over to sap, unlike success factors and, uh, Arba and Concur. Um, but there are other technologies that organizations are leveraging here, platform as a service, automated system deployment, conversion, configuration tools, managed infrastructure solutions, which is where someone else manages your infrastructure for you and open source platforms and operating systems. Um, so what are they implementing now?
(47:07):
One technology that we didn’t even see in terms of, uh, the list of what people are using today is that of data lakes. Um, a considerable proportion of respondents, nearly 50%, I think it’s 47 or something like that are implementing if not this year, then over the next two years. Data lakes, this is a important technology for people as it allows them to centralize a lot of data, both structured and unstructured data, and leverage that data to get a day to day view and real in potentially real time of what’s going on within the organization. They’re also looking at managed infrastructure solutions. Um, could be on premise, could be in the cloud, hardware and operating systems optimized for SAPs for hana. I think as more organizations move to SAPs for hana, you’re going to see that more and more people are implementing hardware and operating systems that are op optimized for SAP hana. We’re looking at open source platforms and operating systems. Nearly 40% are looking at cloud-based, implementing cloud-based infrastructure on top of the fact that 37% are already running that high availability solutions infrastructure as a service and automated system deployment and configuration tools.
(48:32):
So what sort of technologies are people evaluating for the future? So once again, the top of this list is something that we didn’t see in the previous two slides, which is edge systems. Um, and I think if you look at the way people are implementing and thinking about technology these days, more and more sys more and more information is being processed at the edge. You’ve got the edge, you’ve got the core, you’ve got the cloud. And if you don’t have to do all your processing in the core, particularly as those environments potentially become, um, more, as you centralize more and more systems within your environment as many organizations are looking to do, you don’t necessarily want to have all of your transactions going to the core being processed and then having data going back to your distributed environment. This is where processing at the edge can be a significant advantage for you.
(49:48):
You can take advantage, you can process information at the edge and then just send and replicate summary data back to the core, giving you that up to date information on what’s happening in your environment without necessarily expecting your core systems to do all of the individual transaction processing. And this is where edge systems can potentially be an environment. Now SAP systems are not typically running at the edge, but a lot of the vendor solutions, third party solutions that integrate with your solutions may well be running at the edge. And having that information processed away from the central core can keep your central core more performant.
(50:39):
Other technologies that people are evaluating include automated system deployment and configuration tools, managed infrastructure solutions as we’ve talked about before, platform as a service. Uh, SAP hana Enterprise Cloud continues to be very popular from a technology perspective. We’ve actually seen quite a significant proportion of respondents who are thinking about sap. He as an offering and are signing up for sap. He, and then something else that we haven’t really seen too much before. 22% of people, uh, currently evaluating is that of containerization. Now containerization is a little bit different from virtualization because with a virtualization virtualized environment, you’re actually storing the operating system and everything you need for the software in that virtual machine. With containerization, you’ve really stripped that down. All you’ve got is just the software and then it plugs into the operating system that is provided by the container, whether that’s Docker or something else.
(51:53):
But that containerization means that the files you can move around are much smaller than they might otherwise have been in the past. Now SAP has been relatively slow, but adopting containerization, I think only SAP data intelligence is currently supported from a containerization perspective. But, and part, and that may be partly because a lot of SAP systems are not necessarily tailored for a contained environment and the way containers work, but that may make sense for edge systems. It may make sense for more distributed environments, it may make sense for non SAP applications that are running in your environment. So what do we recommend here? Firstly, focus on infrastructure solutions that deliver the performance and security you need. Two of the five requirements that respondents identified as important or very important were performance related. This shows that high performing infrastructure is the most important requirement that any landscape plans must include, but while no organization is likely to invest in infrastructure that does not meet their performance in requirements, the challenge is ensuring the infrastructure is both fast and secure.
(53:07):
As you plan your infrastructure choices for your SAP landscape, focus on ensuring that security is part of the conversation from the beginning. Only by doing that will you end up with a more secure landscape. Second, include availability and resilience in your infrastructure plans. From the start, infrastructure is constantly changing, but one of the most important factors for respondents across the research was the need to have resilient infrastructure that minimized downtime. The more complex your landscape, the more difficult this will be to achieve. While most organizations will look to their software vendors, service providers, or implementation partners as the experts on ensuring that their infrastructure is resilient, sometimes an overlook factor is the operating system vendor. Operating system vendors have information gleaned from thousands of successful SAP deployments that can help ensure your landscape is configured correctly. So make sure you include these conversations at the start of the process to minimize the need for late stage configuration changes.
(54:06):
And lastly, ensure your infrastructure plans include the capacity to support your future technology and innovation needs. Only 12% of respondents indicated the organizations are running edge system. Today, 18% are using data lakes, 20% are using containerization, but 47% are implementing data lakes over the next two years. 38% are implementing edge systems and 34% are implementing containerization. Even though some of these technologies may not seem central to your SAP landscape today, they might be a crucial part of that landscape in the future. So make sure that whatever infrastructure you implement there is capacity, support, future needs that may not currently be on your radar.
(54:48):
So from a recommendations, overall recommendations perspective, firstly determine the success criteria for your infrastructure initiatives early as that will inform your infrastructure plans. So most organizations know what they wanna achieve with their planned infrastructure changes, but to make those plans as successful as possible, it’s important to identify and quantify your success criteria early in the process. While reduced operational cost is a valid goal, setting some specific criteria will help you drive towards that. What is increased security represent? Is it a greater number of detected attacks? Is it patches applied more quickly? Is it a reduced number of alerts? Making sure that you understand the success criteria for your infrastructure early will help provide a smoother transition to new infrastructure and make your initiatives more successful. Second, align your IT and business teams to focus on the most important goals for your users and organization. As you update your landscape when you’re implementing new infrastructure, there is sometimes a focus on the fact that the new must be better, even if it is not addressing the most pressing needs, simply because it’s new. Bring your IT and business teams together to define what goals new infrastructure needs to meet, for example, performance or resilience, and prioritize those when implementing new infrastructure. IT teams may be focused on the drivers to reduce cost while business teams require more resilience, availability, or improved experience. It is only by working in tandem when planning landscape changes that you’ll be able to meet business and IT goals.
(56:30):
Explore how SAP’s cloud strategy will impact your need to update and replace infrastructure. Now, SAP has the goal of moving most of their products and sales from traditional licensing to recurring revenue. This is part of their plan to become a cloud company and they have big goals for 2025. This strategy is the basis for their focus on cloud ERP and solutions like Rise with sap. Even if you currently have no plans to amend the SAP products that you are running, it is important that you understand how their strategy may impact your future infrastructure plans. This is particularly important as many respondents are not planning infrastructure changes in the short term, which means that they need to be more aware of SAP’s strategy for on premise and cloud-based deployments and software.
(57:17):
Lastly, evaluate how you can make your infrastructure more sustainable, both today and as you implement infrastructure changes. More than half the respondents to this research said that a more sustainable infrastructure was important or very important to their organization. This was particularly true for respondents in North America where slightly over 60% said this was important to the organization. This can initially be achieved by better utilization, better utilizing existing infrastructure, using methods like resource allocation virtualization, and advanced power management. But infrastructure plans must include sustainability goals. And unfortunately, I think that is, uh, all the time we have for today. Um, I don’t know that we got to, uh, any questions in this, but if, uh, you do have a question, we will follow up with you on that in the the next few days. So on behalf of SAP Insider and our sponsors at Microsoft Azure, NetApp, suse and T Systems, uh, thank you for your time and have a great day.
Summary
Infrastructure is the foundation of your SAP landscape. Over the last ten years, this has changed significantly for SAP customers, with many moving from Unix platforms running third-party databases to Linux environments using SAP HANA. The shift to cloud-based infrastructure has sped up. While this has been underway for over a decade, organizations have sped up moving workloads to the cloud as they have replaced aging or legacy on-premise infrastructure. To learn more about what SAPinsiders are planning for their SAP infrastructure and landscape, SAPinsider surveyed 120 members of our community between July and August 2022. We sought to understand what SAP workloads they were running; the infrastructure used for those workloads and their timeframe for change. Join this on-demand webinar to discover it’s findings.
