Fujitsu, a longstanding SAP partner, is deepening its alliance with the German software company under a five-year plan to move all its ERP systems on SAP S4/HANA. The project dubbed OneERP+ is designed to implement a standardized ERP across its global operations and position Fujitsu as a digital transformation company– in a repositioning costing around $760 million.

The multi-year DX project was the brainchild of Fujitsu CEO Takahito Tokita and is led by EVP and chief data and process officer Shunsuke Baba according to The Register. The multinational technology company, which currently has about 124,200 employees, is expected to take in an additional 1,500 employees during the peak of the project implementation. 

According to Baba, the OneERP+ program was launched in the second half of 2020 with the objective of building “a foundation to support the purpose-driven and data-driven management”. Fujitsu currently runs over 4,000 systems for internal business and multiple instances of SAP-based systems along with those developed in-house for ERP. Sharing about the hurdles of the strategic shift, he added:

“There are many different business processes and systems for each business and region. One of our key challenges is how to thoroughly standardize all business process data and simplify it as a basic system.”

Moving to One SAP ERP

The mammoth undertaking aims to move all of Fujitsu’s ERP systems to a single SAP S/4HANA platform, hosted in Microsoft Azure and streamline various business processes throughout its global operations. Furthermore, SaaS front-end applications are pegged to run in Azure along with other instances hosted by AWS.

“Our goal with the initiative is to organize and integrate them all at once to standardize and streamline operations in a holistic manner,” Baba added.

The ERP integration project includes managing multiple key business processes such as sales, accounting, procurement, and project management data, among many others. As part of the five-year plan, Fujitsu has been leveraging SAP Concur since fiscal 2022.

“This is a very challenging project, and although it is actually promoted with the inclusion of add-on development, it is not merely an ERP introduction project but is also promoted as a large-scale reform project at the management level on the premise of a large-scale transformation of business processes,” explained Baba. “The organization consists of a team that designs business transformation from a business perspective and a team that implements it as an IT system.”

He highlighted that Fujitsu aims to illustrate to its customers a successful digital transformation and encourage them to embark on their own DX journey. Baba said that the company has the mission to showcase reference models of practical knowledge based on Fujitsu’s own experience and by being the ‘first penguin’ to take the plunge.

As an exemplar of DX with a 40-year global partnership with SAP in technology and services, Fujitsu has recently been recognized as the newest SAP partner to join the Regional Strategic Services Partner (RSSP) initiative launched in Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) to further reinforce the SAP ecosystem within the region. Fujitsu’s participation in the SAP RSSP effort is a major step in realizing the company’s ambition for “Business Applications” to facilitate more sustainable business transformation as part of Fujitsu Uvance, the company’s portfolio of global solutions aimed at realizing a sustainable world. 

The post Fujitsu Embarks on 5-Year Plan to Move to One SAP ERP appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

In February last year, SAP Malaysia Managing Director Kok Cheong Hong voiced his support for the MyDIGITAL initiative which is a core component of the National Digital Economy Blueprint. He referred to it as a significant “breakthrough yet realistic” digital vision for transforming the economy of the Southeast Asian economy into a technologically superior one. The SAP MD also believed that this strategy can serve as a form of motivation for local businesses, particularly SMEs, to establish resilient IT infrastructure, and utilize cloud solutions in order to increase efficiency and productivity levels.

To bolster the support given to SMEs in the country, partners of both SAP and Microsoft Malaysia recently offered to work closely with local businesses to handle the entirety of their business transformation process. This would include service-level agreements, operations, and the resolution of any problems that may inevitably arise during migration. According to Hong, SAP’s collaboration with Microsoft for the SAP Business One (SBO) RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure program is driven by the Malaysian Government’s call for local enterprises to shift to cloud computing.

Moreover, SAP and Microsoft’s joint solution was released after the National Tech Association of Malaysia (PIKOM) encouraged local companies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts in order to maintain a competitive advantage in the Asian region. Malik Murad Ali, the Chairman of the PIKOM CIO Chapter (PCC), stated that digital transformation is essential for building strategies while addressing prospects and difficulties in an environment that has been affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“Local businesses should not be intimidated by digital transformation but view it as an enabler for growth. The SME landscape is especially crucial as many still lag in technology adoption within their business operations,” he added.

SAP and Microsoft Support SMEs Through Joint Offering

SAP Business One aims to help customers fuel profitable growth by gaining greater control over their businesses or subsidiaries, simplifying core processes, and improving decision-making based on real-time data. Additionally, the SME solution can be deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, can be integrated with the SAP HANA platform, and has business intelligence capabilities.

“Local SMEs’ readiness for the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the transition to intelligent technologies on the cloud is a critical thrust to realize this aspiration. SBO is known for connecting and streamlining processes, serving as a catalyst of growth for numerous SMEs in Malaysia and throughout the world,” the SAP MD shared in a statement.

On the other hand, Azure — Microsoft’s global cloud platform optimized for SAP S/4HANA — allows integration with SAP applications and data with Microsoft Teams and Office to increase employee collaboration and improve the user experience (UX). K Raman, Managing Director at Microsoft Malaysia, said the company hopes to provide SMEs a point of entry into a digital transformation that is both accessible and economical through its partnership with SAP Malaysia and the launch of SBO RISE on Azure.

The SBO RISE on Azure intends to help SMEs reduce costs and complexity, as well as provide a secure cloud framework that would keep them protected against cyberattacks, by leveraging both artificial intelligence (AI) and automation capabilities. SAP MD Hong also added that the arrangement using the company’s Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) offering ensures that SMEs have all they need to streamline their transformation journeys without having to make significant upfront investments.

The post SAP and Microsoft Simplify Malaysian SMEs’ Transformation Journeys appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Although conventional SAP S/4HANA implementations are a combination of technical migration and business transformation, SAP customers usually approach these projects separately. For many, the move to the cloud is still purely a question of infrastructure. This is a shame, since a combined move to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud offers companies several advantages at once: digitalization of the IT landscape with high innovation potential, new components and shorter workflows. In addition, companies benefit from lower project costs, shorter project durations and fewer system failures during the implementation.

According to the Benchmark Report published by SAPinsider in November 2021, SAP customers mostly focus on costs (46 percent) and SAP S/4HANA Cloud (39 percent). They are currently less interested in the other parts of the Business Process Intelligence program, embedded tools, industry enhancements, SAP BTP and SAP Business Network.

SAP users are taking advantage of the migration to modernize their existing IT landscapes and at the same time prepare themselves for fully digitalized working environments. In addition, by moving to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud, they can combine two strategic transformation projects and reduce the overall workload. Project managers should allow sufficient time for systematic planning and avoid making rash decisions. So what do companies need to consider when they decide to move their systems, data and applications to SAP S/4HANA Cloud?

Gerald Faust, managing director and CEO – Asia Pacific and Middle East, SNP, said, “In moving to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA through RISE with SAP, organisations can redesign their processes leveraging retained historical data to better align to an entirely new business environment. To support this transition, SNP’s packaged solutions provide rapid implementation based on a proven methodology and a predefined scope, combined with clear and predictable implementation without the usual risk. There is no one size-fits-all formula for organisations undergoing a cloud transformation journey, however when a solution is tailored to meet the organisation’s goals the impact is significant.

This is inline with our own learning, as we walk the talk and move to the cloud with RISE with SAP. SNP has chosen to implement SAP S/4HANA® Cloud, private edition on Microsoft Azure. SNP aims to successfully complete the move to the cloud in just two months by the end of April 2022 and the Datavard integration in a total of five months by the end of July 2022.”

Good Planning Is The Key to Success

To develop the ideal SAP S/4HANA Cloud strategy, companies should first identify their own drivers for wanting to use the cloud. Companies want to free themselves from the burden of a large, on-premises data center and find a simpler, scalable alternative that allows them to save costs or respond to unexpected events in an agile manner.

Furthermore, companies have to gain an overview of their current IT landscape: How big is the system? What data and applications are used? Is it possible to move the entire system or only certain parts? Would this even be allowed and should it take place? Based on this information, companies can plan the project carefully and in line with their corporate strategy, decide on the ideal cloud infrastructure, and select a suitable provider.

Another key factor is finding the right model to deploy SAP S/4HANA Cloud as part of RISE with SAP. The software provider offers two models for this purpose: SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition and Public Cloud Edition. Most SAP user companies are interested in the private cloud. It is primarily aimed at medium-sized and large companies that need to adapt SAP S/4HANA to their requirements and utilize enhancements. The well-known hyper scalers Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM and Microsoft operate the SAP systems. The public cloud is aimed at SAP customers who want to use the standard version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The cloud solution does not allow for any customizing and is therefore particularly suitable for smaller SAP user companies with less complex processes or for new companies. The advantage is that they can achieve the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Allow Sufficient Time to Prepare

Ideally, companies will lay the groundwork in parallel: Many of our customer projects have shown that it is worth cleaning up the existing SAP landscape before the migration. If companies can reduce the data volume in their systems, they will need less cloud storage at a later date, resulting in considerable cost savings. It is also worth aiming for fewer non-production systems such as development and quality assurance systems. This cost-cutting potential is often overlooked, and it can be leveraged more easily than the costs saved by archiving in the production system, or indeed implemented in addition.

Lower Costs, Less Risk? Absolutely!

The next step for companies is to carefully consider the question of how to realize the migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud at the technical level. This crucial decision has a significant impact on the success of the project. It is advisable to use transformation software and an automated procedure. This enables companies to migrate data particularly quickly and securely while also avoiding long system downtimes, as it is necessary to stop business processes during the conversion for technical reasons. In particular, for highly customer-oriented companies with continuous operations and those with global operations, it is important to keep system downtimes to a minimum, since they quickly lead to enormous costs. A direct comparison shows how much the downtime can vary depending on the approach: A modern migration approach enables SAP systems to be converted with near-zero downtime, allowing operations to continue largely without disruption. In contrast, the same data migration using a standard approach would take significantly longer than a weekend and render the IT system unavailable throughout this period.

The chosen software solution should also provide companies with a glimpse into the future: How will the planned changes affect their systems? By simulating these changes before the actual migration, companies can minimize costs and risks and always maintain control of their major project.

Learning from Mistakes? Don’t Make Any in the First Place

When complex SAP systems and processes are moved to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, serious errors can sometimes occur. Those who deal with possible pitfalls in advance are clearly at an advantage. For example, it is important for companies to consider the interfaces that exchange information with internal and external communication partners. There are often several thousand of these digital connection points, all of which need to be identified before a migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and converted or updated during the project. This is the only way to ensure uninterrupted communication between employees as well as with partners, suppliers and customers. In addition, companies are well advised to set aside sufficient resources for test phases with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. To plan or document a migration properly and to ensure that balance sheets are not distorted, close coordination with auditors is a must, especially when migrating financial systems.

If everything has been considered, well planned and prepared, companies can move to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud quickly and securely while also unlocking the full innovation potential of the new technology.

Regional Contact: Priya Sharma,
Head – Marketing, JAPAC & MEA, SNP Transformations SEA Pte Ltd.

For any questions connect at:
marketing-asia@snpgroup.com or +65 98209905.

This article is sponsored by SNP

The post RISE with SAP to the Cloud — What Companies Need to Consider appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Cloud Comrade, part of leading public cloud solutions provider across Asia-Pacific ST Telemedia Cloud, has been strengthening its market presence since 2014 in Singapore and Southeast Asia as a trusted partner of tech giants such as SAP, Microsoft, and AWS. The consulting company’s recent innovation projects across industries in the region have earned Cloud Comrade various partner awards namely SAP Recognized Expertise designation in SAP HANA, Microsoft Singapore’s Customer Experience – Business Excellence, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Singapore Partner of the Year 2021.

Specific to the consultancy’s SAP expertise, Cloud Comrade has recently earned the SAP Gold Partner status in the SAP PartnerEdge programme, demonstrating that the company has a proven track record of customer success, received SAP certifications, met stringent qualifications, and is recognised internationally. The enterprise-focussed firm enables forward-thinking enterprises in South East Asia to move their SAP workloads to the cloud by offering turnkey project services, which include SAP system assessments, strategy consulting and implementation as well as language services support.

Achieving the SAP Service Partner Gold Status

Commenting on the latest SAP stamp, Andy Waroma, Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director, Cloud Comrade said:

“Achieving SAP gold partner status, shortly after being awarded an SAP Recognized Expertise designation in SAP HANA, is a testament to our technical competence and commitment to the highest standards of excellence in cloud solutions and cloud managed services. We take the responsibility that comes with this elevated status very seriously. We will continually strive to be the most trusted collaborative cloud solutions’ partner that is committed to delivering desired business outcomes.”

The regional SAP Gold partner has offices in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia helping customers across the SEA region accelerate their cloud transformation by providing industry-leading, quality consulting services. Earning the SAP Gold status strengthens Cloud Comrade’s position as a trusted SAP solutions provider and cloud migration partner. This accreditation is on top of the company’s award “SAP Recognized Expertise designation in SAP HANA in Singapore” in December 2021, which demonstrates Cloud Comrade’s expertise and skills in SAP HANA and the successful completion of the requirements for SAP Recognized Expertise in the SAP PartnerEdge programme. 

Moving SAP Workloads to the Cloud

As a cloud solutions specialist, Cloud Comrade is in a unique position to offer a variety of cloud options for organisations when migrating and managing their SAP systems because the SAP Gold partner has established premier partnerships with hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“Over the years we have helped our customers to migrate and implement their SAP systems on AWS, Microsoft, Azure, and Google Cloud. We have been building expertise around SAP HANA and SAP managed services to enable our customers to run their SAP workloads safely and securely on Cloud,” Waroma wrote in LinkedIn.

Malaysia’s Baba Products and Indonesia’s Viva Health are some of the companies that have tapped Cloud Comrade to support their SAP systems cloud migration.

The SAP partner led the first phase of spice manufacturer Baba’s IT infrastructure migration that involved SAP S/4HANA on AWS implementation and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. Cloud Comrade supported the integrated health service provider Viva Health’s e-commerce and teleconsultation expansion by successfully moving its SAP Business Suite on HANA to AWS Cloud. The SAP expert now runs Viva Health’s infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and deploys Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for SAP storage and backup, respectively.

The post SAP Service Partner Cloud Comrade Earns Gold Status appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Insights that can be gleaned from mining different new data sets can prove invaluable – particularly when existing data sets don’t reflect new or changing circumstances. For example, City Plumbing, a plumbing and heating company and part of Travis Perkins group in the UK, integrated historical industry sales data with its own sales information to create a predictive forecast that helped them navigate the new pandemic business environment. However, accessing and integrating data manually in these different systems can take up to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of the time estimated for an analytics project and often requires skills which are in short supply.

In fact, our research with IDC revealed that in 2020, over two-fifths of US business leaders reported that their organization had introduced new external data (40{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}), new internal data (45{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}) and new data types (45{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}). The study also showed that more source data is in more disparate locations: on multiple cloud platforms, on-premises, and at the edge. In order to pull all that data together, an integration tool like Qlik Data Integration (QDI) is the best way to replicate the data from SAP and other sources to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.

Data Integration Challenges

However, the process of extracting, transforming and consolidating disparate data sources is not without its challenges. Traditional data integration processes, such as manually extracting, transforming and loading data (ETL), are proving unfit for today’s agile business environment. These traditional methods are time-intensive, costly and often error-prone. Also while many companies are often more adept at integrating data from the cloud, they still need to ensure that they are mining all sources to gain a complete picture. Pulling data from on-premise, mainframes, SAP, various databases, or even alternative cloud sources often involves heavy coding and deep scripting, leaving skilled workers investing time in manual integration when their expertise could be better utilized elsewhere in the business.

Finding Tools That Fit Business Needs

Companies need integration solutions that keep pace with their business by automating and streamlining the integration process. The right integration tools can be transformative for a company, enabling them to take advantage of diverse and disparate data to support the bottom line. These include:

Avoiding cloud lock-in: Organizations need to ensure they’re not locking themselves into a single-cloud vendor. When new data needs capturing, it is important that the selected tool can integrate data from new sources quickly and effectively.

Removing the risk of human error: Modern data integration tools can automate the integration process, removing human error, connecting data sources faster and more effectively. Modern tools automate tasks associated with ingesting, replicating, and synchronizing data across the enterprise. This means that – often for the first time in their operations – analysts have comprehensive, instant data insights without the risk of incorrect data making its way into the pipeline.

Real-time integration: Automating ELT also offers businesses the ability to integrate data in real-time – across on-premise and cloud environments – into one target. A platform that uses automation in the context of Change Data Capture (CDC) enables data from all different sources to be replicated and streamed, as and when changes occur, for near real-time analysis. This gives the business agility to respond quickly to new data and ensures that they can host and analyze it in an optimal cloud platform.

Getting The Complete Picture

Data integration doesn’t have to be a headache. The right solutions can simplify and automate the process, allowing businesses to focus on the insights that inform decisions, rather than concentrating on how to get them to the right place. Automating the integration process from SAP, on-premise or multiple databases eliminates human-error and time-intensive manual integration, giving a business the agility to respond quickly to real-time insights. Using modern and automated data integration technology solutions and techniques, organizations can reduce data integration costs by up to a third and halve the time it takes to get to useful insights from data. By creating a single version of truth through organization-wide automation, businesses can ensure every team member is equipped with a complete, comprehensive picture to inform decision-making and improve business outcomes.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Integrating New Data Sources with SAP appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

For more than 150 years, Greene Tweed has developed materials and engineered high-performance solutions for critical applications in the automotive, aerospace, energy, semiconductor, oil and gas, life sciences, defense and other industries. Headquartered in Lansdale, Pennsylvania and active across the world, its products include O-rings, gaskets, other sealing products, coatings and connectors that are designed to cope with extreme temperature and are used in 90{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of commercial aircraft. Greene Tweed has been using SAP for more than 20 years and the data it holds is critical to running the whole organization. However, the many different extraction methods used for business reporting were slow, increased system overhead and delivered inconsistent data. As a result, data-driven initiatives they wanted to implement in the future such as AI-enabled operations, drives for efficiency and predictive analytics projects looked doubtful.

There was a need to standardize their data and find extraction methods that ensured those data was always accurate, consistent and trustworthy. “SAP is our single source of truth on almost everything and we only have one instance that runs our environment worldwide. Every time we reach into SAP and pull data we are putting stress on the system,” says David Hufnagle, Manager of Enterprise Data and Analytics, Greene Tweed.

Quick delivery of analytics-ready data

Greene Tweed moved to cloud on Microsoft Azure with Synapse analytics services. Having used Qlik analytics solutions since 2016, the company decided that Qlik Data Integration (QDI) was the best way to replicate their data from SAP to Azure. The QDI platform uses Change Data Capture (CDC) to efficiently analyze source systems like SAP to identify any new changes in the data, then captures only the changes, conforms the data and delivers it to target cloud systems like Azure Synapse. This CDC functionality delivers analytics-ready data from a wide range of sources to data warehouses and lakes, streaming and cloud platforms.

“The big benefit of QDI was the ability to pull data not just from transparent tables in SAP but also from other entities like cluster tables which are really hard to extract out of SAP,” says Hufnagle. “The fact that QDI had the dynamic drive overlay (DDO) and the metadata available to navigate those objects was a big plus.”

Low latency for huge data volumes

Utilizing CDC automation, change data is pulled from SAP to Azure Synapse and loaded every into Greene Tweed’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) environment. Seventy-seven million records in more than a hundred tables are replicated using QDI and the longest replication latency is 2.5 minutes.

“The biggest advantage we have seen so far is the times to develop analytics on the data from SAP have been cut to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of previous because we do not have to write extracts anymore,” says Hufnagle. “We don’t have to write a logical layer because we have already incorporated that. It’s just a matter of going and grabbing the data. We’re quicker at getting things done because using data extracts from the cloud is faster than from SAP. “As we are rolling into this cloud environment using Qlik Data Integration, it’s all about the ability to use data to drive change through our organization. Qlik and Azure Synapse gives us the tools to do that.”

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post How Greene Tweed replicated SAP data to Microsoft Azure appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Heidelberg, February 22, 2021 – Following the successful launch of “Cloud Move for Azure” last year, SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE will deepen its collaboration with Microsoft. The new standalone software component of the SNP data transformation platform CrystalBridge^® was developed in close cooperation with the cloud experts at Microsoft and has already been used in migration projects. This has led to results in a matter of days instead of weeks and therefore accelerated the assessment phase. The results have prompted Microsoft to expand its collaboration with SNP as its Preferred Partner for SAP on Azure migrations. In turn, Microsoft will be SNP’s preferred cloud provider.

Microsoft customers planning to move to the cloud can migrate their SAP systems quickly and with minimal risk using the new Cloud Move for Azure software as part of the highly automated CrystalBridge^® platform while also continuing to benefit from the results of joint development and project work in the future. Looking ahead, the agreement shows that the chosen path is the right one for customers and both partners alike: As part of the agreement, the two companies have therefore concluded far-reaching agreements with the aim of driving co-development, joint go-to-market initiatives, co-selling and delivery as well as leveraging the partner ecosystem for scaling and sustainable growth.

“The fact that Microsoft has chosen us as its Preferred Partner at a global level validates our work and our powerful software products, which we want to use to continuously drive the success of our customers,” says Michael Eberhardt, CEO of SNP. “In return, we chose Microsoft to be our preferred cloud provider because of their long-standing and extensive enterprise customer experience, the trusting collaboration between our organizations in the past few months, and their comprehensive portfolio for digital transformation. Additionally, we see a great level of trust in Microsoft and SNP from customers all over the world, especially in the SAP market. Together with Microsoft, we have set ambitious goals for the next three years and will continue to work together on our cloud migration solution to help Microsoft’s SAP customers throughout the world move to the Azure Cloud. It is an exciting project that we are very much looking forward to.”

Gerald Faust, Managing Director and CEO JAPAC, adds: “Predefined fixed-price packages for the initial Cloud Move for Azure assessments, subsequent proof of concepts, and the migration of SAP workloads will make the customer’s journey transparent in the future as well as shorten the transition period. Accordingly, companies can fully concentrate on getting the maximum benefit from their cloud conversion. The SNP BLUEFIELD approach, which makes it possible to move to Azure and to SAP S/4HANA at the same time, offers them an enormous advantage here. This is because it allows companies to quickly reap all the benefits of new technologies for their business processes.”

João Couto, Vice President for SAP Business Unit at Microsoft, explains: “We see a tremendous market opportunity to support SAP customers in accelerating their transformation journey to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud, and SNP is uniquely positioned to help in precisely this area. As a result, we have now chosen SNP as our Preferred Partner for moving SAP customers to the Azure Cloud quickly and securely. By leveraging SNP’s solutions and capabilities, we can provide our customers with a simplified and accelerated path to SAP S/4HANA on Azure. The integrated approach and close agreement between SAP, SNP and Microsoft provide SAP customers with extremely reliable planning and a highly automated solution, allowing them to focus on the real innovation potential and business opportunities created by SAP RISE, SAP S/4HANA and Azure as an intelligent platform.”

To learn more, download the Strategy Paper: Cloud Move for Azure (snpgroup.com)

About SNP

SNP is a world-leading provider of software for managing complex digital transformation processes. Instead of traditional IT consulting in the ERP environment, SNP offers an automated approach using specially developed software: The Data Transformation Platform CrystalBridge^(R) and the SNP BLUEFIELD^TM approach allow companies to restructure and modernize their IT landscapes much more quickly and securely as well as migrate to new systems or cloud environments more securely. This gives customers clear qualitative advantages while at the same time reducing their time and costs.

The SNP Group has around 1,500 employees worldwide. The company is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and generated preliminary revenues of around EUR 143 million in the 2020 fiscal year. It serves multinational companies in all industries. SNP was established in 1994, went public in 2000, and has been listed in the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since August 2014 (ISIN DE0007203705) and was admitted to the SDAX^® in March 2020. Since 2017, the company has been trading as a European company (Societas Europaea/SE).

More information is available at www.snpgroup.com and SNP Business Partner Microsoft (snpgroup.com)

SNP Contacts:

This article is sponsored by SNP

The post Successful Launch of “Cloud Move for Azure”: SNP Signs Agreement with Microsoft to Expand SAP Cloud Migration Solutions appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

After entering an extensive three-year deal to accelerate customer adoption of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure late last year, SAP and Microsoft partnership will inevitably be felt globally. Just recently, SAP Thailand and Microsoft Thailand have partnered to deliver superior SAP ecosystem experience on Microsoft Azure.

To help SAP customers innovate faster with agile infrastructure to support dynamic business despite the global pandemic, SAP and Microsoft leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to facilitate customers’ smoother transition to SAP S/4HANA. Customers would be able to quicken their digital transformation and run the business accordingly in the New Normal with first-class tools and platforms that support effective and efficient management of business assets and operations. 

Verena Siow, Managing Director of SAP Indochina, said:

“Our work with Microsoft makes the migration journey to S/4HANA much easier with a more agile deployment process that fully leverage the capabilities of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. We are very excited to deliver an even better experience for customers in Thailand through strategic and partnership network alignments with Microsoft, ultimately giving customers simpler and more convenient ways to order, deploy, maintain, and learn to master SAP solutions on Azure.”

Project “Embrace” on Microsoft Azure

Project “Embrace”, a joint global initiative to simplify and modernise the customers’ journey to the cloud, carries over in Thailand. SAP and Microsoft’s extensive go-to-market partnership in the country covers every stage of a customer’s transition to the cloud, from conceptualization to sales. Consequently, it will accelerate the adoption and innovation of joint innovations from the tech giants and at the same time bring optimal business results to customers. 

Through project “Embrace”, SAP and Microsoft, with a global network of system integrators, offer holistic bundles with unified reference architectures, road maps and market-approved journeys for customer’s seamless transition to the cloud. To ensure smoother migration of SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers from on-premises to the public cloud, Microsoft will re-sell components of SAP Cloud Platform together with Azure. 

The collaboration is also anticipated to work on future deployment and migration of existing direct SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers leveraging hyperscaler infrastructure. However, SAP continues with its longstanding policy of supporting choice for those customers who request alternatives based on business requirements.

In essence, project “Embrace” provides customers with:

• A simplified move from on-premise editions of SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA for customers with integrated product and industry solutions through industry market bundles.
• Collaborative support model for simplified resolution through a combined support model for Azure and SAP Cloud Platform
• Jointly developed market journeys to support customer needs with the help of SAP and Microsoft system integrator partners.

SAP on Azure Kickstarter Program

In the same vein, SAP on Azure Kickstarter Program taps new customers looking to explore an SAP implementation on Azure to enter a pilot deployment phase at zero cost.

Dhanawat Suthumpun, Managing Director, Microsoft Thailand stated:

“SAP and Microsoft’s partnership has brought together our capabilities at all levels – from the senior leadership to engineering experts and support teams – to take the SAP experience to the next level on Azure.” 

“Through the Kickstarter Program, we are offering businesses a chance to experience the class-leading performance and capabilities of SAP solutions together with powerful, dynamic infrastructure on Azure in a trial phase with no initial investment, allowing them to discover new ways to operate at optimal efficiency with the flexibility to handle everything from major downtimes to peak demand,” Suthumpun added.

Mike Chan, General Manager for Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Asia Pacific, shared: 

“With joint support and dedicated engineering capabilities from SAP and Microsoft, we are able to offer the best SAP experience on Azure with simpler ways to try and acquire new solutions, faster and more convenient deployment, and less turnaround time for support requests.”

“We are also able to provide blueprints that make it easier to achieve an optimal deployment of SAP apps on Azure with reference architecture specifically for each industry – such as finance, oil, and gas, retail, or healthcare – and full compliance with industrial and regulatory standards in these fields,” he detailed.

The post SAP and Microsoft Partnership Reaches Thailand appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Infosys, one of the global leaders in next-generation consulting and digital services, announced its collaboration with JG Summit Holdings, Inc. last 17 September. JG Summit Holdings is considered to be one of the most diversified conglomerates in the Philippines. Their headquarters is located in Manila.

Infosys will be its technology services partner and will assist in formulating and executing JG Summit’s digital transformation by leveraging Microsoft Azure and SAP S/4 HANA. The collaboration is expected to deliver JG Summit’s smooth implementation and migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This will build an agile digital infrastructure for its business operations.

The Infrastructure Management Solution Suite, Infosys’ full hybrid IT management platform, will be used in building and governing the hybrid cloud environments. This will help enhance the overall experience of the end-user. Infosys will also implement the SAP S/4 HANA on Azure and deploy its next-gen learning solution, Wingspan. The deployment will help create a collaborative relationship and learning culture for JG Summit’s employees who will benefit in developing their advanced skills.

JG Summit Holdings’ President and CEO, Lance Y. Gokongwei said:

“Our objective is to embed digitization into our core business strategy across units, subsidiaries, and affiliates. Through the partnership with Infosys and Microsoft, we aim to accelerate our digital transformation journey which will enable us to address evolving business requirements, facilitate easy and secure collaboration among employees and offer better service to our end customers.”

Meanwhile, Infosys’ Executive Vice President and Global Head of Consumer, Retail & Logistics, said:

“We are delighted to be selected as the strategic partner of JG Summit in their digital transformation journey. Leveraging our expertise in digital technologies and a comprehensive understanding of the business landscape, we will provide JG Summit a secure, scalable and cost-effective hybrid cloud platform for large-scale digital transformation and enable a seamless transition to a modern digital workplace. The partnership with JG Summit is also aligned to Infosys’ strategy of helping our clients navigate their next by augmenting their core digital capabilities, advancing their operating models and transforming their talent for the future.”

Microsoft Asia Pacific’s Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Operations, Ricky Kapur, emphasised how JG Summit is paving the way for Philippine organisations to assess their transformation journeys.

He said:

“JG Summit, with Infosys and Microsoft, will have a clear strategy and a strong roadmap which will enable them to develop their unique capabilities continually, value for customers and maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world. We’re excited to be helping them on this path of transformation, as we together, enable every organization in the Philippines to achieve more.”

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Compliance and Reliability in the Cloud

Talend announced that PointsBet is using Talend Cloud and Microsoft Azure to deliver a unique mobile betting experience to just under 100,000 customers worldwide and support its international expansion. With Talend, PointsBet can connect and govern diverse data sources with speed, trust, and reliability across its IT infrastructure and ensure compliance with regulations as it expands globally.

“PointsBet is fully digital, and it’s critical we can access data in every system to ensure a streamlined platform. Talend helps us quickly and efficiently integrate all of our data and ensure we’re compliant across the board,” said Maayan Dermer, BI and Data Engineering Lead, PointsBet. “Talend is the glue between our systems, and has enabled us to reduce troubleshooting times from four to eight hours weekly down to an hour, while simultaneously improving our data reliability and stability.”

Global Expansion

PointsBet standardised on Microsoft Azure due to its scalability to handle peak online gaming requests and agility to quickly spin up new projects. Talend was a natural fit with out-of-the-box native support for Azure Blob Storage, CosmosDB, SQL Data Warehouse, SQL Server, Azure SQL Server, and Native SQL Server, as well as the flexibility to run workloads in the Cloud or on-premises . As PointsBet, who just recently was licensed to operate in New Jersey, starts expanding throughout the US, Talend will play a vital role in supporting the roll-out of its Data Analytics infrastructure and ensuring the company maintains compliance with varying state regulations. With Talend Cloud, PointsBet is able to provide a unified view of all of its data and comply with the periodic reports and requests of the online betting industry.

“It’s critical for data systems to maintain reliability and trust, especially in the cloud- and digital-first systems , not to mention when you are managing significant sums of money,” said Ciaran Dynes, SVP of Products, Talend. “PointsBet is using data to quickly respond to dynamic requests internally and externally. We’re proud to support the company as it grows and expands into new markets.”

For more information on how PointsBet is using Talend click here.

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