Since 2014, Tokyo Energy and Systems has deployed over 1,400 SAP licenses in an ERP implementation to centrally manage codes used for nation-wide construction sites. The licenses were issued for payroll and accounting, inventory control and work management. However, due to heavy user training requirements, the implementation took two years rather than the planned one year.

The customization and running hardware on the existing infrastructure became cost prohibitive to maintain. Last year, Tokyo Energy and Systems began migrating to a third party Infrastructure as a Platform solution whilst conducting a review of heavy support costs. Rimini Street, a global support provider for SAP software products, was selected to provide third party SAP application support.

Kotaro Matsuhashi, manager of ICT Promotion Department, Tokyo Energy & Systems, said:

“We were able to centrally manage construction sites by implementing the SAP platform, however the delay in getting the system operational greatly exceeded our planned schedule and the enormous costs to operate the system became a problem… Switching to Rimini Street, and migrating to the cloud, has allowed us to save substantial budget that has been used for updating our IT environment for construction sites across the country as well as improving our internal operational efficiency.”

With rapid response support in place, Tokyo Energy and Systems was able to drastically reduce time spent on custom system issues. This reduction in time, cost and resources, along with a 50{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} saving in annual support fees, has enabled Tokyo Energy to focus on and invest in advancing their IT department. Yukihiro Kurihara, executive officer and general manager of the ICT Promotion Department, Tokyo Energy & Systems, said:

“Leveraging Rimini Street services, our support costs were cut in half and we were able to free up internal resources which was a welcomed change. This allowed us the opportunity to take on new IT challenges, and work toward the actualization of our own business-driven IT road map versus following the road map of the vendor. Part of our future plans include extending our business to post-construction operation management of power facilities.”

Read more about Tokyo Energy and Systems Inc.

Read the Rimini Street press release

The post Tokyo Energy and Systems Accelerates Digital Innovation appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Most businesses, regardless of their size, have the same basic processes. They sell a product or service, manage its sourcing and delivery, and then report on the outcomes.

While large companies have integrated, end-to-end systems to support these tasks, such systems tend to be too complex and expensive for small and mid-sized firms. As a result, most SMBs instead have to rely on less expensive, point solutions to help run their operations and track results.

This collection of disparate systems is known as a technology stack. The stack could include sales and record management systems, business intelligence and analytics tools, and financial close management applications. Increasingly, businesses are seeing clear benefits in evolving their stack to take advantage of continuing improvements in technology.

Why update the tech stack?

In the accounting department, upgrading an existing technology stack can make sound business sense. Manual, spreadsheet-driven processes that have been in place for years can be removed and replaced with streamlined, automated alternatives.

For example, rather than having to extract data from an ERP system, manipulate it in an Excel spreadsheet, and then export it into a reporting application, all these steps can occur seamlessly.

The business can also benefit from improved visibility. Data can be readily accessed via on-screen dashboards that can display custom views, specific metrics and KPIs. This can deliver levels of business insight that have not previously been possible to achieve.

Governance and control processes can also be improved. Senior managers are more easily able to see how their business is tracking and whether it is meeting its compliance requirements.

Factors to consider

While there are clearly business benefits to be gained from undertaking a financial technology stack update, there are also some key issues that should be considered. These include:

• Sequencing: The order in which new technologies are deployed can be as important as the technologies themselves. Consider the impact each will have on existing workflows and determine how the rollout can be completed with the least disruption to the business.
• Resource availability: Determine how many staff will be needed to implement the changes and whether they have sufficient time free to devote to the project. There is always the option of bringing in external consultants to assist with the project should resources be tight.
• Data quality: It’s important to remember that the outputs from new applications are highly dependent on the quality of data they are being fed. Examine all data sources across the business and ensure they are delivering the most up-to-date and accurate information possible.
• Integration: It’s likely that some existing systems will remain in place, so it is vital to consider how these can be effectively integrated with new applications and processes. This removes the chance that a slew of new manual workarounds will be needed.
• Change management: Ensure all staff understand what is being undertaken and the benefits it will deliver to them. Getting their buy-in early will help to smooth the transition process.

Benefits of an end-to-end solution

With an integrated technology stack in place, the accounting department will quickly see some significant benefits. It will allow the business to continuously evolve, automate and scale accounting processes to support timely and accurate reporting. This, in turn, will increase opportunities to analyse results and support ongoing business decisions.

Looking specifically at the close process, better integration also allows the systems of record to be more closely tied to the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) application being used.

Traditionally a business’ accounting team would have to extract data from sources such as bank records, the general ledger and sub-ledgers. This data would then be processed by staff undertaking manual account reconciliations, transaction matching and examination of spreadsheet variances. Once these tasks were completed, the data would then be fed into the FP&A application.

Through better integration, these processes can be significantly improved. By using software, such as BlackLine, to bridge the gap between the systems of record and the FP&A application, the financial close process can be streamlined and automated.

Taking this approach means the business can extract the most benefit from a truly integrated financial technology stack. Data integrity is boosted and the quality of output is improved. Transaction matching can be automated and previously manual workflows embedded. It also provides the opportunity to control document storage which can further improve staff efficiency.

Continuous accounting

The end result of a successful finance tech stack upgrade is the ability given to the business to embrace the concept of continuous accounting. This embeds control and period-end tasks within day-to-day activities, thus allowing the rigid accounting calendar to more closely mirror the wider business.

Rather than having a shifting workload that can put significant pressure on staff at certain points in the monthly, quarterly and annual cycles, that workload can be spread more evenly across the entire period.

The result is a better-balanced workload for all accounting staff at all times which, in turn, frees up more of their time to focus on value adding tasks such as analysis and forecasting.

Real-time visibility of business performance can also be achieved. This will boost business agility as management will know where the business is now rather than where it was last period.

Taking the time to revise a business’s financial technology stack will deliver significant benefits – and the best time to start is now.

Ann Furlong is director, operations APAC, for BlackLine. This article is sponsored by BlackLine.

The post The accounting benefits of evolving your business technology stack appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Takeshi Sone, general manager, solution business promotion department, IT platform products management division, Hitachi, said by 2020, SAP HANA is expected to be widely used by enterprises.

“To support this trend, Hitachi Ltd is expanding our SAP HANA infrastructure and strengthening our cloud service, empowering Japanese on-premise SAP HANA users to move to the cloud. This shift will reduce day-to-day resource requirements for system setup through operation for SAP HANA implementation and improve application performance, minimise system downtime and drive greater business process automation and efficiency. The partnership Hitachi Ltd has with Commvault allows us to meet the growing demands for cloud solutions and maintain quality customer satisfaction levels.”

According to Commvault, its back-up services will bring multiple advantages to the Hitachi HANA Cloud Service, including increased integration allowing direct backups of the SAP HANA database; deduplication of backups to decrease overall size; a unified user interface to support Sybase and VMware databases; licensing based on 1TB capacity units; and support from the Commvault engineering and customer support teams as well as Hitachi.

“We are excited to partner with Hitachi, Ltd around their growing cloud services offerings. With Commvault, Hitachi, Ltd can empower businesses with end-to-end data protection, simplified management and portability of SAP data. This allows companies to access and understand data quickly, thus providing them with a solid, unified foundation to derive deeper business insights and gain a competitive edge,” said Yuichi Tawara, vice president for Japan, Commvault.

The post Commvault to provide backup for Hitachi HANA Cloud Service appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SUSE and AWS extended their relationship in an effort to satisfy increasing demand for the agility and cost savings of cloud-based business-critical applications. The previous agreement, which commenced in 2014, allowed AWS to resell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on AWS Marketplace.

“Tens of thousands of enterprises around the world, spanning major industries, count on SUSE for their mission-critical computing environments, including those running SAP workloads,” said Naji Almahmoud, vice president, Global Alliances, SUSE. “The marketplace can expect continued collaboration, which will enable us to meet and surpass customers’ demanding requirements for SAP workloads on AWS.”

“We are excited to extend our relationship with SUSE to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on AWS Marketplace,” said Bas Kamphuis, general manager, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

The increased level of collaboration bodes well for the future as many large enterprise customers currently use SUSE solutions to develop, test and run their production SAP workloads on AWS and SAP HANA workloads on AWS have been increasing since the release of X1 and X1e.32xlarge Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

The post SUSE and AWS extend collaboration to increase support and affordability appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

The Fujitsu Integrated Systems PRIMEFLEX for SAP HANA and PRIMEFLEX for SAP Landscapes solutions, which leverage the company’s FlexFrame Orchestrator Management Software, allow organisations to implement and operate SAP-certified infrastructures that can handle vast quantities of big data efficiently, and which are scalable for future growth.

According to the company, the solution cuts the number of separate physical data lines required in a scale-out installation from three or more to just a single 100 Gigabit Ethernet connection, also reducing the number of required switch ports by at least a factor of three, simplifying installation and operation, and ensuring a reliable, high-performance infrastructure ready for big data, AI, IoT applications and future S/4HANA deployment.

The new systems are available to order immediately.

The post Fujitsu launches enhanced systems for HANA deployments appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

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.”

The post Coca-Cola East Japan embraces cloud for SAP BI on HANA appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Enterprise-class cloud platform and cloud services provider Virtustream is leveraging its position as part of the Dell/EMC family to fuel some well-calculated but rapid-fire expansion of its ability to safely and securely deliver complex, mission-critical applications in the cloud into the Asia-Pacific.

With Australian data centres in both Sydney and Canberra now running customer data, Japan will be a fast-follow, as operations in both Tokyo and Osaka are scheduled to begin as early as next week. The expansion means that Virtustream is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of enterprises, service providers and governments in the region seeking to migrate critical business applications to the cloud. SAP customers are prime examples.

Describing pent-up demand in the region, Simon Walsh, COO, Virtustream said, “Some of the biggest SAP users are headquartered in Asia. So when we look at the economic environment of Japan and Australia and New Zealand, we see a number of big companies, we see a lot of significant SAP investment from those companies in SAP technology. We have a significant number of companies suggesting they intend to move to technology such as HANA or they intend to move to things like S/4 or they have big requirements for BW.”

“The two data centres in Sydney and Canberra are very strategically important for us, in that they enable us to expand and serve the federal government,” said John Kaleski, ANZ sales director, Virtustream, adding, “Our expansion into the region is going extremely well so far. We have a unique story to tell and it is being received very well.”

Expansion in this part of the world was a natural move for the company that describes itself as being purpose-built for SAP, rather than simply accommodating SAP. Virtustream can support the technology requirements of mission-critical SAP architectures along with other requirements such as performance, compliance, security, data sovereignty and disaster recovery that will enable these Asia-Pacific giants to move to the cloud.

“We are prepared to tackle the most challenging digital transformation projects for our customers in Asia-Pacific,” said Walsh. “Our local partnerships, combined with the strength of our cloud platform, deep expertise in the enterprise cloud space and relationship with Dell Technologies will provide businesses in the region with an unprecedented opportunity to utilise the cloud to rapidly transform and scale their businesses.”

Virtustream’s partnership with Dell EMC is a critical element in its formula for success as it expands in the Asia-Pacific region.

“The Dell EMC family enables us to leverage their relationships across all industry verticals. The Dell EMC market share and strong long-term relationships provide us with a huge entry into the market,” said Kaleski.

It’s a matter of trust and experience. “A lot of the trust comes from existing customers. New clients or prospects talk to our existing clients and they say could you tell us about your experience,” he said. And they do.

“A large proportion of customers are evaluating whether they should be embracing HANA systems. We have undertaken over 800 HANA migrations. This means that we are able to help our customers accelerate to HANA platforms and therefore take advantage of their investments in SAP licences and tooling,” Kaleski said. “This is one area where we are materially advancing our customers’ progress with HANA. Our cloud proposition is based on some patented technology that we own called micro-VM and this enables us to run SAP in the cloud and only charge customers for the capacity they are using when they are actually using it.

“We have chosen to put our public cloud for Japan in data centres owned by NTT Communication. We did an evaluation of the Japanese data centre footprint marketplace and determined that the best option for us were NTT data centres. I do know that NTT Communications is launching more data centres.”

Walsh said the expansion to Asia-Pacific did not pose unexpected challenges.

“We had to do a thorough evaluation of things like power, resilience, and data centre geographies. In Japan we did a very specific test around earthquake readiness just to make sure there was an environment that could sustain it, hence why we ended up picking NTT Communication, just because the engineering build of their physical buildings was superb.”

“We always get asked about competition and I have to say that competitors are varied. A lot of the time we compete against the classic outsourcers and then occasionally someone will say the other bidder is AWS, but I don’t really consider AWS as a direct competitor because the architecture of what we do is different,” Walsh said.

“It’s a significant market that we’re pursuing. Increasingly there is a customer appetite and a shift to look at business critical systems and to move those systems across to a cloud environment. Most of the time to move these applications you need to undertake some sizing and some organisational readiness. That’s the experience we have – onboarding these systems is a key ask, so it’s important to make sure that you’ve got SAP knowledge, SAP sizing experience and experience of how to transition from perhaps a DP2 environment onto HANA or an Oracle environment onto HANA or a Sybase environment to HANA. You need to have those clear capabilities from the professional services and project management point of view.”

Virtustream does not provide estimates of growth in employment, but Walsh said, “We’re adding net new resources in Australia/New Zealand and Japan. I can’t give you the exact numbers, but the progress is encouraging.”

Further expansion is also in the offing, often driven by the data sovereignty laws of different countries.

“We have geographic expansion plans – we continue to explore areas such as Canada, India and the Middle East, but we have not yet taken any decisions on those geographies. We don’t have anything in India yet. We don’t know yet if we will proceed into Canada in 2017 or if it will be part of a longer term expansion plan.

While the company is moving quickly, it is certainly thinking strategically about where to go from here, Walsh said.

“Obviously we chose Japan and Australia/New Zealand because we observed that the market is ready for our value proposition. So we started out with Asia expansion. That gives us all three theatres: Americas, EU and APJ. There is a lot of interest and enthusiasm in the Virtustream value proposition as a consequence of the uniqueness of what we do. We’re excited about our ability to support business critical systems in the public cloud.”

The post Virtustream expands enterprise cloud platform for SAP HANA in Asia-Pacific appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

The new portfolio, designed to work with any workload, budget or service level, on- or off-premise, includes a powerful mid-range HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 all-flash array, cloud-ready Nimble Storage flash arrays powered by predictive analytics,  new Nimble secondary flash arrays (SFAs), affordable fifth-generation HPE MSA storage and high-speed StoreOnce Cloud Bank data protection.

“As flash permeates the data centre it has become critical to move beyond the array – from predictive analytics to data protection to investment strategies,” said Raj Thakur, general manager, data centre and hybrid cloud group, HPE South Pacific.

“These new solutions help more customers maximise the value of flash on-premises and enable flexible off-premises data mobility,” he said.

The HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9450 is a scalable, multi-tenant all-flash platform for mid-range organisations hitting the performance limits of aging systems or for organisations with longer term investment plans, providing a convenient path to next generation storage class memory.

HPE MSA 2050 and 2052 provide affordable starting points for application acceleration, providing the flexibility to mix any combination of SSD and SAS drives.

As flash storage becomes more pervasive, organisations are increasingly looking to public cloud solutions to optimise their hybrid IT mix. According to HPE, StoreOnce CloudBank reduces bandwidth requirements by more than 99 per cent, resulting in storage costs of just $0.001 per gigabyte per month.

With increasingly affordable flash storage and a mandate to increase storage capacity using existing infrastructure comes an increased adoption rate of flash by organisations of all sizes. Adoption increased by 25 per cent in the last quarter of 2016, with 51 per cent of customers predicting that they will have an all flash data centre in five years or less, according to Q4 Post Purchase Reports released earlier this year by purchase intent marketing and sales services company TechTarget.

The post HPE launches expansive flash portfolio update for hybrid IT appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Customers will be able to load up to 30 terabytes of data to fully configure solutions for prototyping or proof of concepts, to get a true sense of the business value an investment in HANA might bring.

“Our customers understand that innovation drives competitive advantage, and SAP HANA enables a new level of business transformation,” said Simon Spence, global director of Dell SAP practice, Dell Services. “The lab environment for SAP HANA offers our customers the ability to test their current and future SAP applications and benchmark their performance to facilitate rapid adoption within their organisation.”

According to Dell, the lab offers a personalised user experience covering mission-critical business processes, such as sales, finance, manufacturing and procurement, and also serves as an accelerator for applications such as analytics and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Customers can also temporarily use the environment for upgrades and rollout projects.

For more information about the Dell Services’ Innovation Lab for SAP HANA, visit www.dell.com/en-us/work/learn/enterprise-applications-services-for-sap.

The post Dell launches ‘try before you buy’ lab for HANA appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SAP will use the CtrlS-powered Cloud4C to extend the availability of SAP’s private, secure managed cloud service throughout the Asia-Pacific region, will plans to expand this later to other global markets.

The focus for the partnership will initially be India and Thailand, and will later expand across Southeast Asia, followed by Australia and New Zealand.

The agreement sees CtrlS become one of the few partners delivering cloud infrastructure for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

“We are delighted to partner with SAP,” said Sridhar Pinnapureddy, founder and CEO, CtrlS. “We believe this partnership is a perfect fit for customers seeking a comprehensive, robust and secure solution to host SAP HANA. As the world leader in enterprise software domain, SAP is absolutely the right partner to help transform the way businesses adopt SAP HEC and experience the potential business benefits.”

CtrlS currently operates two facilities in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and plans to launch new operations in New Delhi and Bangalore.

“CtrlS has been a crucial long-term partner to SAP,” said Peter Amor, SAP head of HANA Enterprise Cloud and managed services sales for North Asia and India. “They enabled the establishment of a strong SAP cloud capability in India. Due to the commitment of CtrlS, SAP currently has 11 productive customers on HANA Enterprise Cloud in the Indian subcontinent. CtrlS’s continued expansion as a HANA Enterprise Cloud Premium Supplier for data centre capacity and cloud services provides an excellent opportunity for SAP to broaden our cloud offerings across the region.”

The post SAP to expand HANA Enterprise Cloud availability in Asia-Pacific appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.