A platform for customers and partners: The Universalists
The IT scene has changed from a hardware wizard and software pioneer to a service provider. The success of AWS can best be explained by this service concept. The complexity of the digital transformation will be manageable with cooperation in the future. Power of Three, a connection between AWS, NetApp and PCG (Public Cloud Group) is proof of this in the SAP community.
Shared history
AWS and SAP have been working together in the cloud since 2008. Many existing SAP customers have chosen the AWS cloud architecture for their ERP infrastructure. With Rise on AWS, existing SAP customers can focus on their business, not migration. This S/4 conversion service is complemented by the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which is also available on AWS. This is used to manage individual ERP data and evaluate Abap code from previous SAP releases during the migration. The AWS partner network, such as NetApp and PCG, with the world's leading SAP consultants in the cloud, is ready to ensure success in the cloud.
With 15 years of experience supporting SAP applications and thousands of SAP customers implementing in the cloud, Power of Three can help minimize risk, reduce costs and accelerate time to value.
Rise and Grow are important basic functions for existing SAP customers, as SAP CEO Christian Klein emphasized in an interview for the German magazine Computerwoche at the beginning of April. Christian Klein told my colleague Martin Bayer at CW Germany: "Beyond this basic operation, customers are free to design their own solutions. SAP is also agnostic when it comes to choosing a partner with whom customers want to implement the Rise package."
The S/4 conversion concepts to the SAP community are therefore the challenge for Power of Three. AWS, NetApp and PCG are orchestrating the release change to Hana, S/4 and BTP with a sustainable service concept. The task is to transform into a coherent operating environment and customize the SAP BTP services. If Hana, S/4 and BTP can be run in the same cloud, the complexity of the ERP landscape, data sovereignty issues, security gaps and latency times are reduced. SAP itself has chosen AWS as its cloud provider to run BTP services. The SAP Business Technology Platform is critical for existing SAP customers to bring the latest capabilities to their core ERP systems to drive innovation and transform their business - and no other cloud provider supports BTP customers as well as AWS in partnership with NetApp and PCG. More than 60 BTP services run on AWS. This allows users to access data, analytics, AI/ML, IoT and application development services outside of their SAP landscape using the same AWS infrastructure that customers rely on for their mission-critical SAP environments. AWS supports these BTP services in nine regions worldwide, currently providing comprehensive regional coverage. AWS also supports BTP services that are not available from other cloud providers, including transformative services such as SAP AI Core, SAP AI Launchpad, SAP Build Apps, Document Information Extraction and SAP Analytics Cloud Embedded Edition.
Big tech and ERP
Florian Böhme joined Amazon in 2008 and managed various areas before taking on a leadership role as Country Manager for Amazon Business in the D-A-CH region in July 2016. In August 2023, he took on global responsibility as AWS Account Director for SAP. Florian Böhme holds an MBA from the Open University Business School and is passionate about diversity and equal opportunities in the company. In the E3 interview, he explains: "SAP and AWS have been working closely together in the cloud since 2008 - the longest partnership of any cloud provider. In those 15+ years, AWS has worked with SAP to deliver numerous innovations for customers,
z. For example, a certified infrastructure for productive SAP workloads in 2011, specially developed instances for large in-memory databases with Hana and the automation of software distribution and system administration. Many SAP offerings run on AWS today, including Signavio, S/4 Hana Cloud, Concur, BTP and SAP Datasphere."
SAP Hana Cloud is compatible with AWS Graviton processors, which offer price, performance and energy efficiency benefits and enable SAP customers to achieve up to 35 percent better compute performance for analytical workloads. AWS has also announced a pre-release of Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances for large in-memory databases with up to 32TB of storage. "This improves the starting point for the largest existing SAP customers to move to the cloud," emphasizes AWS manager Florian Böhme. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud, pre-announced by AWS, is another example of the support provided to SAP customers working in regulated industries and the public sector in an independent cloud environment specifically designed to meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements.
Thinking outside the box
Florian Böhme emphasizes in the E3 discussion that the relationship with SAP goes beyond AWS and thus offers the opportunity to drive innovation together with other partners - see Power of Three. Amazon companies such as Twitch, Zappos.com and Zoox also rely on SAP software and AWS to manage their global and local processes. SAP has partnered with Amazon Business to enable SAP users to access hundreds of millions of items on Amazon Business directly from SAP Ariba solutions. Finally, SAP and Amazon are working together on sustainability by signing the Climate Pledge to reduce annual carbon emissions to zero by 2040. A very important topic for SAP CEO Thomas Saueressig.
Currently, only a few existing SAP customers are interested in a lift and shift of their existing business-critical applications, as the core issue is a digital transformation that must deliver sustainable value for future business processes. This modernization of business applications for existing SAP customers and the redesign of business processes are the primary goals of most SAP users.
Since the launch of SAP S/4 Hana in 2015, AWS has been working with SAP on the ERP side to help existing customers migrate to S/4 as part of their digital cloud transformation. This began with the first instances specifically designed to run in-memory applications based on SAP Hana.
"We are now focusing on making the Rise transformation as simple and smooth as possible for our customers, in close coordination with SAP and our partners," concludes Florian Böhme, describing the future portfolio of tasks. "With Rise on AWS, existing SAP customers not only receive S/4 Hana, but also services for the migration of their current ERP systems and cloud applications - all on the most secure, reliable and comprehensive cloud infrastructure in the world - in one contract."
The migration to S/4 in the cloud is not just about bringing ERP and infrastructure up to date, but also about making the companies of existing SAP customers future-proof and more resilient and using the latest functions in the areas of generative AI, IoT, analytics and automation.
Partners and customers
Existing SAP customer Siemens and Amazon Web Services are expanding their partnership to make it easier for companies of all sizes and industries to create and scale software applications with generative artificial intelligence (AI). Experts from areas such as development, manufacturing, logistics, insurance or finance can use generative AI to develop new software applications and improve existing ones. To this end, Siemens is integrating Amazon Bedrock into its own low-code framework, a Siemens low-code platform and part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. Bedrock is a service that provides powerful AI base models through a single interface, along with the necessary security and privacy applications and integrated responsible AI.
Conclusion
Leading companies are modernizing their ERP landscapes with Rise with SAP. To maximize the value of Rise conversion on the AWS platform and achieve transformation goals, existing SAP customers need not only a cloud provider with a proven track record of performance, reliability, security and innovation, but a network of specialists.
Power of Three is an organic collaboration of SAP experts, where everyone contributes their specific knowledge in addition to the other players. Power of Three is proof that the saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is justified in the SAP community. The sum of the services of AWS, NetApp and PCG can bring a successful S/4 conversion to existing SAP customers.
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