Making the cloud tangible

Disruptive technologies and business models - we encounter them in many areas today. In the SAP environment, too, new megatrends are regularly proclaimed that call all previous technologies into question. This can be overwhelming for SAP customers, because orientation and prioritization are difficult.

Alongside the "perennial favorite" S/4, the path to the cloud is the topic that clearly dominates the SAP market. But for many customers, the switch to the cloud, whether hybrid or multi-cloud, is confusing and like a journey into the unknown. One of the reasons for this is that the entire market environment and the partner ecosystem are subject to constant, enormous pressure to change. Thus, infrastructure is becoming a commodity and business models of traditional hosting providers are collapsing. The great potential today lies in the application landscape and in future topics such as artificial intelligence or big data.

Azure added value

Microsoft understood this early on and, with Azure, shows its customers the added value that parallel business transformation and innovations also bring on the application side. Not least, Microsoft has underlined this once again through its close partnership with SAP. We at SNP are also starting at this point: With our software - the platform for data migration, CrystalBridge - we enable precisely this parallel business and IT transformation in one go-live.

SNP software developers, in collaboration with Microsoft Engineering, have developed SNP Cloud Move for Azure, a software based on CrystalBridge. With SNP Cloud Move for Azure, -Azure landscapes can be dimensioned and created interactively and automatically. The appropriate infrastructure can therefore be simulated, priced or actually generated within minutes for each step of the business transformation on the basis of the selection and transformation requirements. The customer can thus simulate his journey to the cloud as part of an assessment or start the migration project directly in the shortest possible time.

The extensive overlapping partner ecosystem of Microsoft and SNP acts as an important accelerator of the global roll-out of SNP Cloud Move for Azure.

For example, some of the first major joint projects have been in a triangular constellation with a global systems integrator. The first project examples range from a leading supermarket chain in Australia to a major university in Saudi Arabia and a large German provider of smart roof solutions.

With regard to the actual transfer of data to Azure, we are also breaking new ground together with Microsoft with predefined fixed-price migration packages. The Cloud Migration Packages enable a fast and secure transformation of SAP landscapes to the cloud. The aim of the development was to enable customers and partners to migrate to the cloud quickly and easily, while creating planning and cost transparency.

For us, the cloud is not only a driver for transformations, but it is also a driving force for fundamental changes at SNP itself. Because we are also in the middle of the process of moving our own SAP landscapes to Azure. In addition, all SNP software products are being successively developed in the direction of cloud-based SaaS solutions.

The technology leap is to be used to surprise SAP customers with groundbreaking to disruptive innovations - in terms of functionality, but especially also in the areas of integration and usability.

However, there is always one thing in the foreground for us: to provide customers with a simple and low-risk SAP and business transformation so that they can quickly benefit from the added value of the change.