Ten Years Common- Working Group SAP on IBM i

The Common working group entered its eleventh year with an exchange of current information on SAP, IBM and IT management. Common - the world's largest association of IBM information technology users - was founded in Chicago in 1960.

Clarification necessary

What will the future partnership between these two major IT players look like for SAP and IBM users? Especially in the age of Hana and the new S/4 product, there is still a great need for clarification.

Antonio Palacin, Director IBM SAP International Competence Center, took on this task and explained in a detailed presentation that there will continue to be many areas in the future where SAP and IBM have a complementary service portfolio to offer.

Stephan Kammerer, IBM Head of the Porting Team, and his colleague Christian Bartels reported on the latest developments and gave the audience the necessary certainty that SAP on DB2 for IBM i will continue to be a stable platform in the coming years.

Time does not stand still. Especially not in Walldorf. For this reason, the new direction of the working group was also announced in Paderborn.

Power for Hana

Peter Althapp and Manfred Engelbart have been observing the development of the SAP Hana in-memory platform and its impact on users for some time.

Since IBM also announced Power technology for Hana at the same time, it was time to establish a contact point for those who want to run Hana components on the Power platform.

A kick-off event will be held in Walldorf on September 21. Themed days on Hana on Power (HoP) will then be held from 2016.

"Many users will operate hybrid SAP landscapes in the future, as they will have one leg in the traditional IBM i or AIX environment and the other running the Hana database.

From this perspective, the next few years will see many transformation projects with a gradual profile and fewer with a "big bang" character

says Engelbart with a view to the coming years.

Despite all the enthusiasm for the various technologies, we should not forget the old advertising slogan of the AS/400 community: "Run your business, not your computer!"