The hybrid cloud makers

For some years now, we have been hearing an either-or approach from SAP and partners, which often does not correspond to the reality in the SAP community. It seems that existing SAP customers are more interested in hybrid systems.

"Instead of an either-or, there will be a merging of data center and public cloud infrastructures"

postulates Nutanix manager Peter Goldbrunner at the beginning of the E-3 interview:

"The result is a hybrid cloud, which 87% of the IT decision-makers we surveyed in Germany last year consider to be the ideal operating model."

This is accompanied by a modernization of data centers, away from traditional infrastructures, whose share will fall from almost 60% to 12% in the next three to five years, according to a Nutanix study.

Mirroring this, IT decision-makers are planning to increase the use of a hybrid cloud from eleven to 55 percent.

"We make this possible with our solutions," explains Goldbrunner.

"A true hybrid cloud is characterized by the fact that the technology stack of the public cloud is also implemented in the data center, that the transitions between them become invisible, so to speak, and that the management of both worlds, including app mobility, can be controlled centrally"

is how Markus Pleier describes the successful Nutanix scenario.

This requires the principle of software control, which is completely abstracted from the underlying hardware.

"This is exactly the case in the public cloud"

emphasizes Nutanix manager Pleier.

"And that's exactly what we bring to the data centers of existing SAP customers with our hyperconverged infrastructure software."

As a result, this portability means the end of the IT silos that every self-contained environment and infrastructure, including the public cloud, threatens to become. Portability also applies to the licenses or subscriptions that existing SAP customers purchase from Nutanix.

"But let me emphasize once again how important it is for companies to have their own data center"

emphasizes Peter Goldbrunner in the E-3 discussion.

"On the one hand, we are seeing the aforementioned modernization push. On the other hand, 76 of the IT decision-makers we surveyed stated that they were bringing workloads from the public cloud back into their own environment."

Experts from the SAP community cite security, compliance, but also costs and control in general as reasons. It was and is an illusion to believe that all workloads will migrate to the public cloud in the long term. Why?

"Because the cloud is not a location, but an operating model. Customers want to decide which location they ultimately choose for this operating model based on business criteria such as intellectual property protection or costs. With our solutions, we enable them to do that"

replies Goldbrunner.

Resilience

On the path to digital transformation: Does the existing SAP customer have to choose between flexibility and rigidity in order to achieve stability?

"If stability means rigidity, then he would actually have to opt for flexibility. The principle of 'never touch a running system' no longer applies"

says Peter Goldbrunner in the E-3 interview.

Companies must be able to adapt their IT quickly to changes in the business, and Goldbrunner believes that stability and flexibility are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, flexible IT is a prerequisite for business stability today. This raises the following questions:

During the current crisis, was IT able to move work to the home office quickly and in compliance with performance requirements and regulations regarding security and compliance? Can IT flexibly support business measures such as acquisitions and disposals in response to the crisis?

Can IT contribute to overall cost reductions in order to cope with the consequences of the crisis without having to abandon strategic initiatives or no longer being able to support certain business requirements?

Is IT in a position not to lose sight of the goal of digital transformation despite short-term priorities to the contrary? And: Is IT flexible enough to improve the conditions for medium and long-term projects with the help of short-term measures?

These are crucial questions that arise when thinking about the right balance between flexibility and stability. Peter Goldbrunner and Markus Pleier explain together: "From our point of view, there is a term that expresses both: resilience."

Hana and S/4

Hana and S/4 are huge challenges for traditional SAP customers: For its Suite 7 with AnyDB and Abap/Java stack, it needs robustness, simplicity and automation with an option for the S/4 future. Sounds like squaring the circle.

"This only squares the circle as long as it is not possible to create a common basis for both worlds, for the current landscape and the future S/4 environment"

says Markus Pleier and he shows that as long as a completely new stack, including infrastructure, has to be created for an S/4 and Hana landscape, the transformation to the new software and database generation represents something of a shock from an IT perspective.

"That's why a new, resilient infrastructure is needed to absorb this shock and provide robustness, simplicity and automation for both existing and future SAP environments and digitalization initiatives."

Peter Goldbrunner:

"With our offering, we not only relieve SAP teams of time-consuming infrastructure tasks, but also help them to save costs. Instead of having to make extensive upfront investments to introduce our infrastructure, existing SAP customers can simply subscribe to it. In this way, we are shifting costs away from capital expenditure to operating expenses, following the example of the public cloud."

Despite the desire for change, existing SAP customers naturally want to keep the costs for Hana and S/4 as low as possible, but still achieve maximum added value.

"The business benefits offered by our hyperconverged infrastructure software apply to every application landscape and generation. The operating teams can import updates at the push of a button without having to worry about dependencies at infrastructure level"

is how Peter Goldbrunner describes the Nutanix universe.

Release cycles are becoming shorter and the level of security is increasing. Developers can choose from blueprints for test and development environments and implement these environments at the touch of a button.

Hyperconverged infrastructure

"Our infrastructure scales linearly"

emphasizes Markus Pleier.

"This is also familiar from the cloud. Our management software forecasts future resource consumption and makes suggestions for expansion. On this basis, IT then simply adds further nodes, i.e. combinations of computing and storage resources, which seamlessly expand the resource pool. This is made possible by the distributed, fail-safe architecture of our infrastructure software."

Details can be found in the Nutanix article by Bas Raayman on page 46. No new infrastructure needs to be installed either for the expansion of existing business suite landscapes or for the implementation of S/4 and Hana.

Digitization gains

Peter Goldbrunner talks about the current challenges:

"In the short term, it's certainly about costs, as well as supporting immediate business priorities. In the short and medium term, the challenge is to achieve rapid digitalization gains without having to replace the entire application landscape or move everything to the cloud."

Goldbrunner and Pleier agree that in the medium and long term, it is ultimately about the transformation to Hana and S/4, which must not be sacrificed for short-term goals, neither in terms of time, technology, organization or business management.

So if the transformation has to be postponed for obvious reasons, the aim is to make up for this loss of time at a later date without an explosion in costs or additional personnel requirements.

The existing SAP customer is always very concerned about continuity, stability and investment protection. Peter Goldbrunner:

"In the medium and long term, customers face the demographic challenge of only being able to meet the demand for qualified young talent with difficulty or even only partially.

The focus for existing SAP customers must therefore clearly be on increasing productivity and concentrating on activities with high added value in IT."

The SAP community knows that high added value requires not only technology, but also training.

"Existing SAP customers can use our software to automate many tasks that previously could only be carried out by designated specialists, for example for databases or storage media and technologies"

is how Peter Goldbrunner describes a solution. This means that the specialists must be made fit for the tasks of the future as part of the modernization process.

"As far as investment protection is concerned, we have very good arguments"

Goldbrunner knows.

"On the one hand, we support the hardware platforms of numerous providers via our partner and certification program; on the other hand, existing SAP customers do not have to switch to new generations of SAP software at the same time if they opt for our HCI software."

The Nutanix investment protection has a long-term effect. With the help of the software platform, customers can easily take the next steps towards a private or hybrid cloud, as this is exactly what the offering was built for.

ROI: 534 percent

Market researcher IDC has calculated the total cost of ownership for Nutanix customers: With the help of the enterprise cloud software, they were able to reduce their total cost of ownership by 60 percent and achieve a return on investment of 534 percent over a period of five years.

In addition, Nutanix customers have reduced the time required to administer their IT landscape by 60 percent and the number of unplanned system downtimes by a whopping 97 percent.

"In my opinion, the latter value impressively demonstrates the stability in terms of resilience that existing SAP customers can achieve with the help of our infrastructure software"

emphasizes Peter Goldbrunner.

SAP partnership

"Nutanix is an SAP Global Technology Partner and worldwide member of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, SAP COIL for short"

explains Markus Pleier.

"This gives us direct access to a complete proof-of-concept environment so that we can also test and optimize all innovations for SAP landscapes. It also allows us to address customer-specific requirements in the best possible way."

The fact that Nutanix software engineers coordinate with SAP at its headquarters in Walldorf every week and permanently run over five Nutanix clusters in the SAP data center, on which development, testing and validation is carried out, demonstrates how close the collaboration with SAP is on a day-to-day basis.

"We also have an agreement on joint technical support for existing SAP customers"

adds Goldbrunner.

"This enables us to prevent any discrepancies or misunderstandings regarding responsibilities, which is extremely important from the customer's point of view. We are very proud of the quality of our support in particular."

Future

"I think the biggest challenge is to make the transition to a new ERP generation as simple, fast, smooth and economical as possible"

emphasize Pleier and Goldbrunner.

This also applies in the event that existing SAP customers postpone the transformation to the new product generation from Walldorf in the short term. In this case, the current measures must prepare for such a changeover in the best possible way and not make it more complicated and expensive at a later date.

With software solutions from Nutanix, existing SAP customers can harmonize their short-term and long-term goals and create an optimal foundation for transformation. Goldbrunner:

"Let me emphasize that our Enterprise Cloud OS software is certified for Hana, the S/4 application server, NetWeaver and also relational database management systems on NetWeaver."