Everything's hybrid: SAP and the multi-cloud

The future is hybrid! That's the mantra of our cloud experts, and it also applies to the topic of SAP, because the most important corporate software in use around the world is moving increasingly into the cloud. Why is this happening? Let's look at it this way: Digitization and disruption force providers and users alike to implement considerably more agile business and operating models. This means that over and above demand-based operation, whether on-premise or in the private cloud, highly flexible development and project environments are also emerging in the public cloud. This is particularly simple to do and is of course considerably cheaper in comparison.

By 2025, the Walldorf-based company wants to provide around 500,000 business customers with S/4 HANA from the cloud. Companies like the abovementioned automotive supplier are obviously not going to make a clean break and simply shut down their existing systems; for most companies, it is evolution rather than revolution that is the order of the day. In a process of individual steps, their IT landscape will be developed based on a hybrid model. But of course it is not just about pushing forward the digitization of business processes, making IT more flexible, improving the quality of operations and cutting costs. These were already the pressing issues of the last two decades. In the era of digitization, it is far more a question of extracting more knowledge from the data that this type of corporate software yields. In the best case scenario, this would provide so much knowledge that the company can not only adapt to new market requirements quickly, but can even predict how this market will develop, securing the decisive competitive advantage for itself – disruption being the key word here.

Quality issues were the trigger for the SAP transformation at one of the world's leading automotive suppliers. The starting point was of 300 SAP systems and 100 non-SAP systems at a variety of release stages, which had evolved into a complex IT landscape with the associated high management costs. The aim of the transformation was on the one hand to create a basis for more flexibility, and on the other, to provide the criteria for the implementation of SAP HANA for real-time analyses, because the company was planning new products and solutions for self-driving cars. T-Systems brought the systems onto its dynamic services platform, while at the same time introducing a new SAP template. The new cloud solution now offers the company the dynamic adaptation of the infrastructure resources, in addition to demand-based SAP license models for short assignments, such as in test scenarios. HANA was fully integrated into the service and the price model. This means that the automotive supplier can evaluate its new business ideas in real time and make business decisions quickly, while at the same time reducing costs and effort.

With the S/4HANA platform, SAP is committed to what is known as an in-memory model, which can increase the speed of data mining by up to 1,000 times because it does not access classic databases, but instead uses data in the RAM This enables a wide range of real-time analyses, leading to a more comprehensive and more "real" picture of reality. It also means that external data sources can be used, for example data from social networks, but also measurement data from sensor networks in machines, cars, railroad cars, etc. In these cases, the database becomes hybrid. The data from a variety of platforms must be made available and usable for processing on an SAP system. This requires systems integration expertise. This applies of course not only to external data sources, but also to in-house non-SAP systems.

Hybrid
In information technology, the word "hybrid" is used in two contexts. In the first, hybrid signifies the combination of different IT delivery models, for example the combination of private with public clouds or on-premise installations. In the second, hybrid is used to mean data in different formats from different data sources. The linking of the different data sources and formats leads to the creation of a hybrid database.

T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom have been working with SAP for many years. What began more than ten years ago as Dynamic Services for SAP in the private cloud has become the world's biggest SAP cloud, with some 3.5 million users. At its foundation are T-Systems data centers and Deutsche Telekom's global network. Last year, the Open Telekom Cloud meant the addition of a public cloud platform. Deutsche Telekom's corporate customer arm is the only partner in the world that holds SAP certification for end-to-end operations. Based on this comprehensive foundation of expertise, operations experience and integration capabilities, T-Systems developed  Cloudifier. This program helps companies move into the cloud at a fixed price, within a fixed time frame. It is based on a "transformation factory" developed by T-Systems, with highly standardized processes and specific, defined service packages. This brings the Telekom team one step closer to the idea of a robotics-supported, error-immune migration at the touch of a button.

But it's not just SAP that companies are interested in. It's also about Salesforce. And Microsoft. And so on and so on... it's about a multi-cloud, an entire ecosystem of cloud technologies and cloud solutions. After all, the IT world is very diverse – one might even say hybrid.