The good news is, SUSE has fine-tuned a range of best practices which we know can make your SAP migration journey as smooth as possible.

1. Create the business case for migration

Your technology team may understand why you’re migrating SAP to the cloud, but the broader business needs to be brought along for the ride. Executive sponsorship is crucial for creating organisational buy-in, so it’s important for senior leaders to understand:

• how the project relates to digital transformation objectives
• why it’s the right time in relation to your hardware refresh cycle
• the efficiency and agility opportunities that migration will enable

2. Find the right skill sets

Understandably, no one wants to mess up an essential workload, which is what can make SAP migrations so daunting. Thankfully, you will already possess all of the skill sets and expertise for avoiding costly errors, particularly when you consider you have access to:

• training from cloud vendors
• SAP training and tutorials
• SUSE expertise and training
• your own network of technology service providers with their own experience in SAP migrations

3. Involve everybody in the migration

SAP migrations don’t happen in a vacuum. There will be just as many business decisions that need to be made as there are technical decisions. 

There are a variety of consumption models along with considerations for deployment and how to architect. Bring key business decision makers into each stage of the process, and consult widely with your contacts from SAP, SUSE, your cloud vendor, and your other service providers.

4. Don’t forget about Day Two

It’s easy to focus on the migration itself, and the process of getting from A to B. For the migration to be truly successful, it’s also key to think about what happens when the migration is complete.

For instance, you’ll likely have an SAP landscape built on a series of SAP application instances in the cloud, but what tools are you going to use to maintain and patch those instances? Along with having the right tools and technology in place, you also need processes for continuously gathering the latest information from SAP, SUSE, and your cloud vendor to ensure you are maximising performance and minimising inefficiencies.

No one has to go it alone on their journey to the cloud. While migrating on-premise SAP workloads takes an investment of time and resources, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is the ideal platform to help you reduce the risk of service outages, minimise effort during system maintenance, and deploy services faster, both on-premises and in the cloud. Additional offerings include SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, SUSE Manager as well as SUSE Global Services all of which make up our completion solution for SAP Infrastructures.

Contact SUSE to learn how you can get started on your journey to the cloud today.

About the author

As the Managing Director for SUSE in Southeast Asia, I know our customers demand open technologies that help them drive their business outcomes. I believe the trend of enterprises leveraging open source technology will rise drastically as it allows companies to develop an ecosystem that can advance faster innovation, enabling unprecedented scale, adaptability and additional new features supporting changing trends and customer demands.

This article is sponsored by SUSE

The post How to Ease Your Journey Migrating to the Cloud appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

We face not only market changes through disruptive technology, digital transformation and competitive threats, but also COVID which has shifted customer expectations.

To drive the perfect enterprise, we need to redefine how enterprise software creates value in a digital, networked economy.

SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications (customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes, and models) and innovations (Internet of Things, Big Data, business networks, and mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in a digital and networked economy. This is why SAP has evolved its application platform to empower businesses to transform their operations to meet the changing needs of their customers and employees.

There are 3 perspectives to consider. The business value perspective, where SAP S/4HANA creates unique opportunities to reinvent business models and drive new revenues and profits. From an IT value perspective, this means that SAP S/4HANA simplifies the landscape and help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Just how do you make the move, exactly? The legacy infrastructure currently installed may not be the one you need to get the most out of an SAP S/4HANA deployment. Traditional ways of implementing and managing infrastructure simply don’t work in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

SUSE considered the challenges customers face:

• Choosing the right mix of on-premise, public cloud and hybrid cloud platforms
• Maintaining increasingly complex infrastructures
• Replacing outdated manual processes that are time-consuming and error-prone
• Learning new skills to support cloud platforms
• Addressing business requirements for faster time to market

Moving to SAP S/4HANA means rethinking infrastructure and processes. To make that move, and ease the customer’s pain by addressing those challenges effectively, you need a trusted partner that can deliver benefits such as:

• Automating infrastructure management
• Delivering services faster with automated tools
• Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA on-premise or to the cloud smoothly
• Minimizing risk of downtime with services to ensure reliability and security

Learn how SUSE can enable you to harness the promise of SAP S/4HANA.

This article is sponsored by SUSE

The post How You Can Get The Most Out Of SAP S/4HANA appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SAP and SUSE have been co-innovating for two decades now, offering next-generation solutions to accelerate enterprises’ digital and business transformation. As a testimony of the two company’s collaboration, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has now been certified as an SAP-Endorsed App, SAP’s premium certification.

SAP Endorsed Apps, a new category launched in June 2020, is one of SAP’s initiatives to help partners and customers’ businesses run better. An invitation-only program and part of Partner Software Progression, it features solutions from the SAP ecosystem of partners that are proven to deliver outcomes that solve business challenges. SAP Endorsed Apps are accessible in SAP Store, the German company’s new consolidated marketplace that merged previous SAP Store for SAP solutions with SAP App Center for partner solutions. 

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, along with other SUSE solutions such as SUSE Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, is available on SAP Store.

SUSE’s President in the Asia Pacific Japan region Phillip Miltiades said that being certified as an SAP Endorsed App makes way for faster solution deployment. He highlighted:

“SAP Endorsed Apps are certified to interoperate and adhere to SAP’s strict enterprise design principles. It simplifies procurement and means customers can move from buying to using in the shortest possible time. This simply means quicker deployment and thus quicker return for your investment.”

In the same vein, Tom Roberts, Senior Vice President, Partner Solution Success at SAP, said that SAP values ecosystem innovations that support the software giant’s vision and delivery of the intelligent enterprise. Commenting on the recent recognition of SUSE’s solution for SAP applications, he said:

“We applaud SUSE on achieving SAP Endorsed App status for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. This application has undergone in-depth testing and measurement against benchmark solutions earning its premium certification. SUSE is a trusted, long-time partner who shares our commitment to customers, and I look forward to our continued partnership.”

The Server for SAP Applications

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is a software delivery and management platform uniquely designed to fuel business growth, improve customer retention and drive operational excellence by delivering SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver services faster and more efficiently with less risk. It can deliver reduced downtime of critical SAP application-based operations with built-in business continuity, including an advanced high availability solution and automated data recovery for SAP HANA. The solution leverages a fast, reliable, and secure Linux operating system through SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

“SUSE Linux Enterprise is the server for SAP,” Miltiades said. “It has everything that you need for SAP and features that you can depend on to keep your SAP solutions secure, reliable, scalable, and predictable so you never have to worry about your IT solutions servicing your business needs”.

Here are some of the key features and benefits of the SAP Endorsed App SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications:

• Improve service reliability
• Strengthen business operations
• Deploy SAP S/4HANA services faster
• Reduce complexity of infrastructure management

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications can be deployed on a server, integrated with SAP Cloud solutions, and delivered as a Software-as-a-Service solution.

The post SUSE Solution for SAP Applications Now an SAP Endorsed App appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Economic uncertainty, supply chain disruption, trade disputes, fast-moving market entrants – add to that customer expectations for seamless digital experiences at all times.

How do you move forward and transform IT? How do you avoid downtime and service interruptions? What are the right systems, platforms and partners for your digital transformation journey?

There is no single starting point and there are many options for the journey ahead to technology and technological change but there are common traits and an interplay between people, processes, technology with organisational culture at the locus.

For digital business leaders & business enablers, secure IT transformation means moving toward scalable, reliable, open infrastructure that enables growth while mitigating risk to transform an organization’s business model, products and services.

People – harness strengths & foster a growth mindset

Creating a strategy to power secure IT transformation is only possible with broad corporate support. From our experience, organizations should start by aligning IT leaders, business executives, and the C-suite on the organization’s IT modernization and business continuity objectives.

Secure IT transformation initiatives almost invariably affect many departments and functions at your organization, spanning business units, nance, and IT. Make sure every stakeholder is aligned on objectives, the value of the target outcome, and their roles and responsibilities, both at the start of the project and during execution.

In identifying potential solutions, it is likely the team will need a mix of promising proprietary and open source platforms or products. Consider how each of these technologies can support the organization’s objectives, beyond a simple ROI calculation – determine which solutions best contribute to your goals, and anticipate the priorities of each stakeholder involved in the technology adoption.

Organisations – innovation and security

Resilient organizations are aware of the need for continuity of the brand and nonstop business is now the norm.

They also share several traits:

1. unity in responding to disruption, with IT and business leaders staying aligned as the enterprise shifts.
2. use IT to gain competitive advantage, investing in technologies that help groups work faster and with greater autonomy.
3. embrace a growth mindset, fostering a creative problem-solving culture that spreads throughout the organization.

In these ways, IT has a unique opportunity to build resilience throughout the organization, enabling the enterprise to invent its future in an era of uncertainty.

Every organisation has a unique context – through shared understanding, leadership, culture, and open source technologies, various stakeholders can minimize the risk of interrupting operations, modernize the customer experiences, accelerate innovation and meet business goals.

This article is sponsored by SUSE

The post Disruptive Not Disruption appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

How much downtime can you afford? One Forrester study made a chilling discovery. Some organisations were experiencing an average of 17 daily outages per day. Over three years, this was costing $1.9 million in lost productivity^[1].

Unplanned outages and manual failover processes are disruptive and time-consuming, piling extra pressure on IT staff. Every minute of downtime eats away at business productivity, which raises costs and hits revenue.

But in a more volatile world, downtime is having a more profound impact across sectors. Armies of employees working remotely are struggling to access applications; supply chains can prove wildly unpredictable, visibility is blurry, and customer confidence is shaky. Of course, you can’t control everyone else’s IT. But if you have SAP mission-critical environments, then you can take practical steps to combat downtime.

How dependable are you?

Imagine if you could get close to 100{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} availability and enable non-stop productivity for your organisation?  Not only would it help your business dramatically and free up valuable time for IT teams. It could also make your organisation stand out in your industry and among customers — for being ultra-dependable.

Amid the current economic uncertainty, there’s a great story happening with organisations which are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. They’ve been able to minimise service outages and simplify maintenance, ensuring their business lines stay productive with continuous uptime.

Take Day & Zimmermann for instance, which has employees in 150 locations worldwide and operates in people-intensive industries, such as construction and engineering, operations, staffing and security.

The company uses SAP applications to manage business-critical processes. Deploying Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has led to availability rising to 99.995{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} for SAP HANA database systems. Day & Zimmerman has only experienced two hours of unplanned downtime in four years. That’s impressive when the Forrester data — if extrapolated — suggests that an average company endures 24,820 outages over the same period.

These aren’t one-offs. Les Enterprises Barrette is another. The company — which manufactures wood, vinyl and other products for a worldwide customer base — migrated from a relational database to SAP HANA with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. The business now has near-100{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} availability, which keeps manufacturing running efficiently around the clock.

What’s key to greater availability?

A stable and reliable infrastructure from SUSE can help you to maximise availability for your SAP services, using a platform that’s trusted by tens of thousands of customers. There are additional solutions that can help too, lifting a considerable burden from IT teams. Discover how it’s achievable by saying Goodbye to Downtime. We’ve pulled together a set of useful resources that dive into the detail, offer practical guidance, and point the way forward to continuous uptime. Now’s a crucial moment to inject extra dependability into IT delivery.

Visit To Learn More: Say Goodbye to Downtime

[1] Cost of lost productivity from 17 outages per day is $1.9 million (risk-adjusted present-value over three years). Source: The Total Economic Impact Of SAP S/4HANA – IT Operations, Forrester

Sabine Soellheim
Global SAP Alliance
Marketing Manager, SUSE

This article is sponsored by SUSE

The post Why Endure SAP Services Downtime When You Could Banish It For Good? appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

In a recent IDC white paper about digital transformation for SAP environments commissioned by the independent open source provider SUSE, IDC predicted that at least 55{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of organisations will be leveraging technology to transform markets, develop new business models, products, and services this 2020 with organisations investing on technologies that help businesses “to achieve speed, scale, and agility.” As the year nears to a close, SUSE’s third-quarter financial results of its fiscal year 2020 that ended July 31 somehow reflected IDC’s prediction.

Despite COVID-19 disrupting the global economy, SUSE achieved a 14{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increase year over year for its Q3 revenue, including a stellar growth in ACV bookings for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, a 35{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increase in high-value customer deals, and strong growth in North America and the Asia Pacific and Japan.

Closing a Strong Quarter

SUSE APJ President Phillip Miltiades shared with Inside SAP his insights on the company’s Q3 performance and its commitment to customers leveraging SAP business applications. He said:

“ In Q3, many of our net new customers chose SUSE for powering and transforming their SAP solutions across several industry verticals such as manufacturing, pharmaceutical, IT, and transportation. This affirms SUSE market position as the leading and trusted open source platform for SAP business applications.

Furthermore, we are pleased to be the open source vendor of choice, supporting our partner ecosystem and their solutions to enable high double-digit year on year growth. Our evolution and focus on being the easiest and most trusted open source provider is translating to increased subscription revenues. We will remain steadfast and committed to providing the most innovative and adaptable open source solutions to support our customers’ desired business outcomes. ” 

Melissa Di Donato, CEO of SUSE, shared how the company was able to perform even in the times of pandemic. She said:

“As the world works through the challenges of the current pandemic, SUSE continues to deliver value as a partner, community member, and provider of transformational technology solutions.

Our ongoing growth reflects our dedication to customer satisfaction as well as SUSE’s strong business model and resilience as a company. And we aren’t stopping here as we plan to further accelerate our growth trajectory with the announcement of a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs, which will significantly expand our portfolio and share in the Kubernetes market.”

In July, SUSE has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Rancher Labs, a privately held open source company that provides a market-leading Kubernetes Management platform. This has contributed to the organic growth of the company in Q3.

Q3 Highlights

Below are SUSE’s third quarter performance highlights:

• 81{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} growth in Cloud ACV (Annual Contract Value) bookings, marking 14 consecutive quarters of year over year cloud ACV increase. 
• 35{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increase year to date in customer deals, which are larger in sizes, worth more than $1 million
• 50{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increase in ACV bookings year over year for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications
• 25{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} and 21{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} increases in North America and the Asia Pacific and Japan, respectively, in ACV bookings year over year.

The third quarter’s outstanding financial results are complemented with SUSE strengthening its executive team to support the company’s key growth objectives. Aside from the appointment of regional sales leads Phillip Miltiades as President of APJ and Jeff Lattomus as President of North America, Andy Myers and Michael A. Riley were also appointed Chief Financial Officer and Chief Growth Officer, respectively.

SUSE also opened a new engineering and innovation center in Sofia, Bulgaria, joining major SUSE development sites in Germany, Czechia, India, and the United States, to bolster its power to innovate.

The post SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications Shows Stellar Q3 Performance appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Sydney – September 9, 2020 – SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company, has carved out the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region and is set to triple its business across the region in next three years. This is following the company’s positive performance in 1H FY2020 which saw an increase of 22 percent in annual contract value (ACV) bookings as compared to the first half of the previous fiscal year. SUSE’s cloud business also saw massive gains of 75 percent in 1H FY2020.

To support this success and reach the next phase of growth, SUSE has appointed Phillip Miltiades as president for APJ. Based in Sydney, Miltiades is responsible for leading and transforming the SUSE organization with laser focus on driving customer and partner business outcomes and success.

“Miltiades’ appointment will extend our capabilities to serve the evolving needs of customers looking to simplify their IT infrastructure, modernize applications and accelerate their business through digital transformation,” said Paul Devlin, chief customer officer at SUSE. “His extensive selling and delivery experience with solid, lasting business relationships with customers are going to help us intensify our focus on customer engagement and deliver the values customers are looking for. He is a great addition to our leadership team and will further strengthen our market position as a leading open source software partner for our customers in the region.”

“This is a wonderful time for me to join SUSE, and I couldn’t be more thrilled,” Miltiades said. “Open source is becoming the backbone for driving digital innovation, according to Gartner*. Increasingly, open source is being adopted for leading edge innovation like mobile, big data, AI and machine learning, and we see great potential for growth across APJ. We provide simplified, innovative, and adaptable open source solutions for our customers’ mission-critical business applications to help them achieve the outcomes they desire.”

“We will accomplish this by bringing the power of the open source community and credibility of our engineering team to provide highly scalable, secure, and high performing solutions that can be deployed anywhere, across any environment and maintained easily on any platform regardless of application or solution deployed. We simply want to be the easiest company to work with by bringing true open source, flexible software technologies with no vendor lock-in to support sustainable and meaningful business outcomes of our customers,” Miltiades added.

As part of a phased multi-faceted investment and growth plan, SUSE aims to drive broader and deeper adoption of innovative open source technologies in key verticals including financial services, automotive, public sector, high-tech, and manufacturing. SUSE will heavily invest in people to service key focus markets, and further enhance its engineering, services, and support presence across the region.

SUSE customers in the region include Air India, JK Tyre & Industries, Mahindra, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Tokyo Institute of Technology, New South Wales Fire Brigades, and Swinburne University of Technology.

Miltiades brings over 25 years of experience in enterprise leadership roles. Previously, he was the chief operating officer at SAP Digital Core, where he was responsible for running and growing SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud Technologies business across Asia Pacific & Japan. Prior to SAP, Miltiades also held several management positions in other tech-related companies.

*Source: Gartner, “What Innovation Leaders Must Know About Open Source Software,” August 26, 2019

About SUSE

SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company, provides unparalleled customer choice and powers digital transformation for the enterprise by simplifying, modernizing, and accelerating traditional, cloud and edge solutions. SUSE collaborates with partners, communities, and customers to deliver and support solutions that enable mission-critical business outcomes. SUSE’s container and cloud platforms, software-defined infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and edge computing solutions allow customers to create, deploy, and manage workloads anywhere – on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

This press release is by SUSE.

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