Established more than a decade ago, The Coca-Cola Company’s Bottling Investments Group (BIG) brings together bottling franchise operations in 18 markets around the world.

With a diverse group of bottlers, including operations in emerging markets such as Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh, the business faced the challenge of how to meet the unique requirements of these operators while maintaining efficient infrastructure and implementing standardised processes.

One area of focus was reducing the complexity, rigidity and costs of running mission-critical applications, including SAP systems. Seeking to gain efficiency, BIG initially outsourced the hosting of these applications.

Coca-Cola East Japan, an independent bottler in Japan benefiting from BIG operational excellence and system templates, was the first however to take the technological step and begin transitioning SAP to the cloud.

Dr Sami Ben Jamaa, senior executive officer and CIO of Coca-Cola East Japan, said when he began the process of investigating partners to move its SAP BI system onto SAP HANA in the cloud in 2014, Virtustream was the only company which could clearly demonstrate experience with HANA and a close relationship with SAP.

“At Coca-Cola East Japan, we didn’t have anyone who knew HANA. We were new to the platform and we didn’t have enough engineers who could understand it. Virtustream was the only one who gave us a very comprehensive picture and managed services around that,” Dr Ben Jamaa says.

Another major advantage for Coca-Cola East Japan was gaining access to Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software via the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, to help actively monitor their cloud consumption and respond accordingly. Virtustream’s platform also automatically and dynamically optimises service requirement to meet the demands of the IT environment or application.

“I still believe it was a big leap in innovation,” says Dr Ben Jamaa. “If you manage your cloud very well, you can save a lot of money every month.”

BIG has now transitioned seven of its international bottlers to the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. By adopting a consumption-based model, the operators have reduced the total cost of ownership of their software, and it is expected that future optimisation could yield even more cost reductions.

Recently, Coca-Cola’s East Japan and West Japan bottlers have merged. Dr Ben Jamaa says all of the West Japan systems are still on-premise.

“The challenge over the next months is to move all the remaining mission-critical applications onto the Enterprise Cloud, with transformation and optimisation of that landscape,” he says.

In the future Coca-Cola East Japan is also planning to move its BI system to S/4HANA around the end of 2018 or beginning of 2019. Virtustream Enterprise Cloud is a great candidate for this journey.

“They have the skills, they have the people, and we have also developed our own internal people to do that. I think it’s very important for us as a business to have that confidence in the vendor and going on the next stage of the journey, without a feeling of risk, because we succeeded in going onto HANA together,” says Dr Ben Jamaa.

Advice on migrating SAP systems to the cloud

Dr Ben Jamaa says there are three key lessons other organisations seeking to move SAP systems into a cloud environment.

1. Migration is not a partner/vendor job, it must be a partnership.

“The business knows their systems, they know the availability they need for that, and what are the issues they have faced before. If you only have management and executive committee from the business, and engineers from the vendor, it will not work. You need to have engineers from both sides working together.”

2. Be prepared to face and respond to unexpected problems in the lead-up to migration.

“During the preparation for the migration, there will be a lot of issues – the testing will be done and you will find that you missed a security port, the batch is not right, and other things. It’s very important to have top managers aligned for very quick decision-making at the time. You cannot be deterred by the risks and back off at this time. Everything comes with its own risks, but you may have regret if you don’t face them.”

3. Don’t necessarily start moving SAP ECC systems first, and then satellite systems later.

“You don’t need to move your enterprise system first – you could put other system onto the cloud first and then SAP can come later. People will stop the process because their ECC system is new or very complicated. You can go for things that are easier and faster, and move to the cloud over time. But you need to have the full picture of the architecture together.”

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KEC is hoping to improve overall agility of business, increase fast-track deliveries, help develop profitability and seamlessly collaborate across businesses to strengthen risk management systems.

“The time to usher in the age of digital transformation and drive the ‘next’ era of growth for KEC is here. At KEC, in the last few years, we have done a lot to enhance our process excellence,” said MD and CEO KEC International Ltd, Vimal Kejriwal. “Now with SAP as our partner of choice, we are enhancing it further, to serve our clients and stakeholders better.”

The implementation at KEC will be led by SAP Digital Business Services.

“KEC will continue their success story in the digital age as the pioneer of India’s infrastructure sector. Our objective is to help our customers run a truly live business and ‘Grow with SAP’,” said Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, VP, enterprise business, SAP Indian Subcontinent.

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Using automation to optimise operations, ATLAS for SAP assists enterprises with a range of business transformations including SAP HANA migration, private/public cloud deployment and SAP S/4 HANA implementation.

ATLAS for SAP combines a suite of SAP tools and methodologies, including SAP Solution Manager and the Activate methodology, with Mindtree’s SAP HANA expertise and experience managing cloud infrastructure and testing platforms. Mindtree has also successfully applied both Agile and DevOps concepts to SAP.

“ATLAS for SAP from Mindtree makes it possible for customers to run their business with minimal disruption while using the power of SAP HANA and the cloud in their journey towards a smarter and nimbler SAP landscape,” said Arun Rangaraju, Mindtree’s senior vice president and global head for SAP.

According to Mindtree, ATLAS’s end-to-end, output-based managed services framework focuses on delivering optimised business value, replacing outdated ticket-in, ticket-out managed application services.

The flexible platform comprises processes, tools, accelerators and dashboards that help a wide range of enterprises to run their technology operations and services more efficiently. With customised pricing models, ATLAS can be employed to design and deploy fully tested applications, scale capacity under very tight deadlines and reduce or eliminate integration risks.

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The managed services will open a simple migration path for China customers looking to access SAP HANA offsite in a cloud environment.

Lenovo will build and operate an end-to-end cloud data centre infrastructure for the solution in China, and will also manage and support its SAP HANA database and applications, including customer technical support such as a hotline service. SAP And Lenovo will expand its market presence and offer off-praise solutions to customers in China.

“SAP’s selection of Lenovo to partner in delivering its enterprise cloud for SAP HANA in China – as well as the trust and confidence implied in this decision – serves as compelling proof of our industry leadership capabilities in this rapidly expanding market segment,” said Peter Hortensius, chief technology officer and head of strategy, Data Center Group, Lenovo.

“It is also the latest demonstration of how Lenovo’s open, flexible strategy of partnering with industry leaders delivers valuable co-innovations that address the most critical challenges of our mutual customers.”

Lenovo, which is currently among the largest SAP customers in China and runs one of the largest instances of SAP HANA in the Asia Pacific region, will gain a major new channel for its capabilities in deploying the in-memory platform, using its own infrastructure.

The new offering will be available starting in the first half of 2017.

“This new dimension of our partnership with Lenovo gives China enterprises access to a powerful, highly scalable cloud solution for rapidly and efficiently deploying applications running on SAP HANA off premise,” said Edward Chen, chief business officer, SAP Greater China.

“Also, we anticipate that Lenovo Enterprise Cloud designed for SAP HANA will be a compelling option for customers because it leverages the company’s high-performance server technology, as well as its deep skills and experience in delivering these applications.”

The two companies are one year into an expanded strategic alliance announced in January 2016, which has included developments such as the delivery of a new smart data-tiering solution for SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA, unveiling of a roadmap for expanded memory support in solutions running HANA, as well as a collaboration with Samsung to outline in-memory systems that can leverage 128GB technology for better performance and scalability.

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With millions of lines of code in the SAP HANA product, and hundreds of developers around the world tasked with working on the product, SAP needed a fast and efficient way to identify and fix coding errors.

The integration with Undo’s Live Recorder will now allow the HANA group to record exact copies of issues that appear during extreme stress testing of the platform, with the information then used to resolve issues faster and more easily.

“It will allow our internal development teams to collaborate more easily when fixing issues, whilst dramatically boosting development productivity and allowing more time to concentrate on innovation for the next generation of HANA,” said Daniel Schneiss, global head of SAP HANA development, SAP.

The selection by SAP is a win for Undo, as the first time its technology has been optimise testing within large complex databases.

“As companies like SAP move their products to the cloud, improving software quality and reducing time to fix issues that occur becomes business-critical,” said Greg Law, co-founder and CEO, Undo. “SAP’s decision to use Live Recorder is a great example of how software quality can help large enterprise software companies maintain a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. Live Recorder dramatically improves traditional testing methods by helping developers find defects as the software is being written.”

Undo’s Live Recorder solution can record all or part of a Linux or Android program’s execution for subsequent replay and analysis. It captures an exact recording of why a test failed, allowing developers to go back in time to any instruction in the program’s history and view any location in memory. Recordings can be analysed on a different machine to the one on which the error occurred, making triage and analysis of failures much quicker, easier and more effective.

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The new services include support for virtual machines, prebuilt integrations for Ariba Cloud Integration Gateway, beta versions of workflow and business rules services as well as smart data streaming for high-speed Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios.

According to SAP, these features enable enterprises to bridge on-premise and cloud landscapes, extend existing technology investments to deliver channels such as mobile and IoT and drive new digital transformation initiatives.

“The new business services can help our customers to fully embrace their innovation agenda at development speed and deployment flexibility that they have never seen from SAP before, making our SAP HANA Cloud Platform even more attractive to enterprises on their digital transformation journey,” said Bjoern Goerke, president, SAP HANA cloud platform, SAP.

The new business services include beta versions of SAP HANA Cloud Platform workflow service and business rule functionality, designed to facilitate connections between business functions and users, and allow business process changes without downtime, as well as SAP Data Quality Management microservices for location data, which allows validation and enrichment for addresses and geocodes.

Other new capabilities include smart data streaming, predictive analytics delivery and the SAP Smart Business service, providing access to and management of key performance indicators in real time.

Apple partnership bears fruit

SAP and Apple have also completed the first deliverables of their partnership, designed to provide early adopters with access to critical enterprise data and processes to enable them to take immediate action using their iPhone and iPad.

These programs include the new SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK for iOS and SAP Academy for iOS, which provides education, training and tools for developers.

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It is the first major update to the platform since its launch in 2010.

The full version of HANA 2 to be released to customers on November 30, with an express edition available soon after for organisations looking to fast-track new development projects. Updates to the platform will be released twice a year.

“SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, products and innovation, SAP SE.

“The release of SAP HANA 2 marks a milestone in the industry, as it represents the next generation of SAP HANA that will propel customers toward a successful and prosperous digital future.”

Among the new features cited by SAP are improved database management, including enhanced high availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements; enhancements to enterprise modelling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage; enhancing analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data; as well as a new file processor API and bring-your-own-language support.

The release includes a new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web applications to allow IT organisations to manage complex information architectures and visualise the impact of new technologies.

SAP also announced the release of a new range of microservices in the cloud through SAP Hybris as a Service, designed to allow developers to enhance applications with analytical insight using simple APIs and any language or development platform. These services include Text Analysis Entity Extraction, Text Analysis Fact Extraction and Text Analysis Linguistic Analysis.

“SAP HANA 2 represents a continuation of technology innovation by SAP, designed to enable organisations to address the fast-changing aspects of digital business,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, IDC.

“SAP HANA 2 features new and enhanced functions that can enhance data management and accelerate application development for digital transformation. In addition, new SAP HANA microservices in the cloud, accessible through SAP Hybris as a Service, are expected to increase innovation of insight-driven applications to deliver competitive advantage for SAP customers.”

On the launch, Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller commented that it’s good to see SAP pushing HANA forward.

“There are a number of good new capabilities in the area of data management, machine learning, analytics and bring-your-own language. But we have to see if this is truly a new platform, or just a well marketed ‘fork’ in the product,” Mueller said in a blog post.

“Ultimately it is a sign of success for the HANA platform. Some customers are looking for stability and no changes, as they are in production, and other customers want or need to push the envelope with the latest and greatest.”

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This version of the solution, which was announced at the TDWI conference in San Diego this week, also expands master data consolidation functionality to the material data domain in addition to supplier and customer data.

New integration scenarios now facilitate an exchange of master data across SAP S/4HANA, the Ariba Supplier Information and Performance Management solution and SAP Hybris e-commerce solutions, which according to SAP will help customers better manage data across hybrid cloud and on-premise applications and processes.

“Information governance is crucial to the success of all digital transformation initiatives – be it a business network, Internet of Things or Big Data and analytics undertaking,” said Philip On, vice president, product marketing, enterprise information management, SAP.

“Our newest version of SAP Master Data Governance offers a strong technology foundation to manage SAP and non-SAP data across any master data domain in one single application. It simplifies master data management and helps customers accelerate their digital business journey.”

Other new features of the solution include upgraded analytics and SAP Smart Business cockpits powered by SAP HANA, which increases its performance and scalability.

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“Since SAP HANA was first released, Commvault has been focused on ensuring that SAP HANA customers can sleep easy at night knowing that their SAP HANA data is backed up for rapid recovery, if necessary,” said Brian Brockway, chief technology officer, Commvault.

“The successful achievement of SAP certification for the Commvault Data Platform with SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems further strengthens our partnership with SAP by demonstrating that Commvault is working with SAP to help customers ensure that their SAP HANA data is protected.”

Commvault provides automated backup and recovery of data in SAP HANA, including SAP S/4HANA and other use cases and deployment types. Customers can use the Commvault Data Platform for rapid recovery, point-in-time recovery, fast spin-ups as well as refresh of development and test environments for HANA, or to create clone databases from snapshots with no production impact.

The Commvault Data Platform is also integrated with the SAP HANA studio and cockpit to support DBA self-service and monitoring of data protection tasks.

As an open, standards-based solution, the Commvault Data Platform also provides native snapshot capabilities across what it said is the industry’s broadest selection of storage arrays, virtualisation platforms and enterprise applications.

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SAP Asia Pacific Japan president Adaire Fox-Martin and Dr Young-Hyun Jun, president of Samsung Electronics’ Memory business, opened the research centre this week.

The establishment of the centre is part of an extended partnership between the two companies to develop more advanced in-memory technology by conducting research into next-generation DRAM for customer solutions and working together on their commercialisation.

Via the centre, Samsung and SAP will provide global customers with optimised solutions through technical support including test runs of the SAP HANA platform and evaluation of Samsung’s latest high-density memory solutions.

The server system at the new centre uses a 24-terabyte in-memory platform, based on Samsung’s 128-gigbyte DDR4 3DS DRAM modules fabricated on the 20-nanometer process node. The companies plan to apply 10nm-class 256GB 3DS DRAM modules next year to overall the system’s performance and power efficiency – expected to lead to an in-memory system that will offer even greater return on investment for Samsung and SAP customers.

“With our latest 10nm-class DRAM technology, Samsung Electronics will be able to provide more advanced solutions for SAP’s next-generation in-memory system in a highly efficient manner,” said Jun. “Samsung will continue solidifying its technology leadership in the high-density memory market through ongoing innovation.”

“Together with Samsung Electronics, we will develop the next generation of in-memory solutions for customers using the SAP HANA platform. This collaboration with Samsung extends our partnership and represents our commitment to drive innovation and help our customers win in the digital economy,” said Fox-Martin.

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