SAP in the Cloud

Cloud computing offers SAP customers the opportunity to achieve significant decreases in total cost of ownership (TCO), while simultaneously improving the agility, performance and resiliency of their SAP deployment. Yet because SAP enables a variety of mission-critical business processes—including finance, human capital management, asset management, sales and procurement—it is important to choose a cloud service provider with extensive SAP experience.

Criteria for SAP Success in the Cloud

Due to the complex and mission-critical nature of SAP installations, enterprises looking to migrate SAP to the cloud should seek a provider able to deliver:

• Extensive SAP Experience: SAP is complex software with stringent infrastructure requirements, numerous modules and many configuration options. To ensure a smooth transition to the cloud, it is essential to work with a provider that is intimately familiar with the SAP landscape.
• SAP Successes: The best indicator of a provider’s SAP knowledge and experience is their ability to help similarly situated enterprises migrate their SAP instances to the cloud.
• Assured Performance: In order to ensure a smooth SAP experience, the cloud platform must guarantee access to the compute, storage and network resources required by SAP. The cloud provider should be willing to stand behind their service by ensuring a smooth experience from the SAP user’s perspective.

Clearing the Big Data Hurdle: The Open Source Advantage

By Christopher M. Carter, Hiln
www.Hiln.com

In today’s world there is a new understanding, the emergence of a new “reality” that is much, much different than what we had even a decade ago.  This new reality of big data that exists within today’s enterprises cannot be underestimated.  Big data is becoming more important in all industries, but none more so than in the finance arena, both in enterprises and big finance in Wall Street firms.  Most businesses aren't ready to manage this flood of data, much less do anything interesting with it.

Big data will impact every industry, from finance to education and government.  In fact, the Federal government just announced a new big data research initiative, with a budget of $200 million.

Data as a whole is a catalyst for business.  According to IDC, there will be 2.7 zeta bytes of data created this year alone.  Now, if you look into the enterprise, you begin to see that in order to begin analysing and deriving value from these increasingly large data sets, organizations need to embrace the right tools that will allow for these new capabilities.  As businesses begin to better understand their existing data, they can gain competitive advantage in the process, however, that competitive advantage can only be realized if data can be processed intelligently, efficiently and results delivered in a timely manner.

How does the enterprise begin to mine its data?  Good question.  With so much data existing that firms can become overwhelmed, how can the good data be identified?   What is “needed” data and what information is not as valuable?   The old mantra of “good data in, good data out; bad data in, bad data out” can help to start answering these questions.   All firms need to be cognizant, first and foremost, of the quality of the data being entered into their systems and used in daily operations. This is especially important in industries like finance, where data is the lifeblood of the business.

Opportunities abound in big data, and an organisation can get as much potential knowledge out of this stored data as they put energy into analysing it.  With applications spanning from Business Objects from SAP and the usage of in-memory data from Hana to newer applications, members of the finance sector are looking to add new positions like a Chief Data Officer specifically to make the key decisions around information that need to be made today.   Big data is indeed big, but it's not for all purposes.  For example, it’s not for transactional or real-time in-memory processing of small and endless streams of structured data.  Think of data like a big truck vs. a small sedan - each has its purpose.  However, both Big data and fast in-memory traditional databases have a place in driving business.

Opportunities in harnessing and utilising big data become more feasible when open source frameworks come into play.  The open source world has basically created the new age of big data analytics, be it when utilising Hadoop, the most widely used and well-known solution for developers, to products like Greenplum from EMC and others.  These tools have created a rush to market to support organisations trying to compute as much data as fast as they can with a solution that will allow them to make decisions in as real time as they can.  For example, a major retailer with outlets around the globe, utilising an open source framework, has the ability to harness the data coming in from their social media sites, run it through their enterprise data analytics solution, utilising literally thousands of nodes, to make real time decisions in their stores about products and pricing.

Three to five years ago this was not possible.  But, with the large and active open source community working on the framework this computation ability now exists and is being utilised and modified by new companies daily.

Corporations are looking at their data as an asset within their walls no matter where it physically resides, but yet there is still so much to learn and to dig through.  The new Chief Data Officer and their team must stay vigilant and be concerned about many factors that will directly impact the business, including how and what data is being provided to regulators.  Enterprises need to set standards when it comes to their information, and this is more important than ever in the increasingly regulatory-focused landscape.  Firms need to insure their internal processes are in place for current government regulatory requirements, as well as taking into account regulations in many of the new laws that are being created, seemingly on the fly.

There is no doubt that bringing the power of big data and harnessing its performance is important and that it will become more strategic when considering how organisations will use the data to interact with their clients, competitors and the market through faster decision-making.  Some companies will start to shrink under the pressure of this new data analysis, while some may indeed fail completely.  But regardless of which companies falter, and which ones gain market share, one thing is for certain: database companies should see tremendous gains as the need for more and more database applications increases.

Organisations are looking to the future and deciding how important a role big data will play in the coming years.  The truth is, how firms utilize big data as a source of knowledge and power will be the largest influence.  These enterprises that find success with adopting open source tools to analyse their information will see improved profitability, provide stronger service throughout the organisation and to their customers and rise above in the land of giants.

How Enterprises Can Bend the Programmer Learning Curve

How Enterprises Can Bend the Programmer Learning Curve

• CHRISTOPHER M. CARTER, VP, Hiln
  

Anyone who works in a corporate environment will tell you that trying to hire developers is probably just as stressful as raising venture capital, if not more so. Why? First, there is the challenge of finding the right kind of developers. Second, once you find the best people, even the most qualified developer can cost a fortune to train; so they seek out environments that can educate them faster and focus on their skill sets and interests.

Why is this an issue? Much more is needed for an enterprise to flourish than just sufficient capital. Enterprises need access to talent in order to execute their vision. Once the talent is found and hired, the new employees can rarely hit the ground running. Often it takes months to find and hire the right developers, and then even more time to “bend their learning curve” so they can successfully contribute to the business.

Imagine a world where enterprises and their developers are able to cultivate the depth of skills that were once reserved for employees with many years of experience and apply these talents instantly to new staff members and application projects. To help speed the ramp-up process, thanks to the advent of applications such as Puppet, Chef and Brooklyn, which allow instant manipulation and modification of enterprise applications, this imagined world is becoming a reality.

With the ability for new employees to quickly get up to speed working with existing enterprise applications, the learning curve on those enterprise-grade solutions has been twiddled away to days rather the years.

In order for enterprises to take advantage of the skill sets of new developers as soon as possible, they must utilize any tools at their disposal, like the applications mentioned above, to bend the learning curve to the enterprise’s advantage.

However, getting a developer up to speed on existing work is just one step in the growth process that enterprises need to embrace. Companies must consider how they can look at each individual developer’s learning curve and bend each one to benefit both the employee and the organization as a whole. Personalization is key in this stage of learning.

For examples of successful education programs, enterprises can look to startups. Unlike many companies that desire that developers bring their own cultivated knowledge to the job, startups tend to take the time to learn about their employees’ desires and educate those who want to be proficient in one or more open source languages (e.g., PHP, Python, Ruby) and can work across the stack and strive to learn more so they are relied upon and viewed as an asset to the business.

While there seems to be a decent pool of ASP.net, C# and Java developers already in place in organizations, enterprises need to learn that it is cheaper and more efficient to utilize open source technologies (in most cases), and to find employees who want to become proficient in these languages. Typically in the past, many skilled enterprise developers didn’t adopt open source languages simply because they didn’t know any better, and they became stuck in their ways or earned enough money not to care. Instead of taking the time to learn new languages, they focused on their existing strengths.

However, a new age is dawning and the enterprise can learn from the methods of the startup and discover that shortening the developer learning curve by enticing them with new-age applications that appeal to their interests is key to achieving enterprise business success.

If you are a competent developer, you generally have no need to worry about job security because you are in such high demand. If you think about it, this situation is actually quite scary because the developer holds all of the cards. This won’t change any time soon.

Since most companies will not, or cannot, take the time to provide education on new skills, if the position where you are currently employed becomes stagnant, you simply move onto the next one. But, if the enterprise is willing to look into employees’ passions and educate them to develop based on their interests, the learning curve is forever bent in the favor of the enterprise, the “growth” of the employee and their combined future.

It’s fair to say that education for developers is continuing to improve, but there is still a ways to go. Enterprises need to offer more open source languages alongside, if not in favor of, the existing languages taught in corporate training facilities, allow employees to gravitate towards their strengths and focus on applications and needs that tie into their passions.

As more companies allow developers to drive the evolution of their education, the faster these organizations will help create an internal revolution, where the benefits to developer morale and work quality will be seen almost immediately. Once the learning curve is bent to the developer’s strengths, enterprises will see the passion and drive that startups have seen for years and the results will speak for themselves.

Christopher M. Carter is vice president of business development at Hiln Solutions. He is responsible for driving Hiln’s business development and partner relationships. Chris is a serial entrepreneur who founded two successful startups and is credited with creating the world’s first SAP cloud solution. He brings over 20 years’ sales management experience in the technology sector, most recently in a senior business development role with CCI & Hiln.

Zynga Co-founder’s Junyo Is Using Big Data To Help EdTech Companies Better Understand What Schools Really Need | TechCrunch

In 2011, Steve Schoettler left Zynga, the company he had co-founded four years earlier, to devote himself to a new project, called Junyo. With interest in education technology beginning to take hold, Shoettler and his co-founders at Junyo set out to leverage the growing capabilities Big Data tools and analytics to tackle some of the deep-seated problems in the educational system. Chief among those was using data to help schools get a more complete picture of student performance and answer the question: What should we teach students next — and how?

via Zynga Co-founder’s Junyo Is Using Big Data To Help EdTech Companies Better Understand What Schools Really Need | TechCrunch.

SAP’s Purchasing Power Play

SAP just did a big acquisition, along with a little head fake.

While the announcement by SAP, the German enterprise software company, said this was a deal about online marketing, in fact, it’s part of a broader effort by many companies to reshape retail sales.
SAP announced Wednesday that it was buying Hybris, a Swiss e-commerce software company. The price was not disclosed, but someone familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record, said SAP paid “somewhat less than $1 billion” for hybris.

The deal follows Tuesday’s announcement by Salesforce.com that it was acquiring ExactTarget, an online marketing services company, for close to $2.5 billion.

Not surprisingly, many industry analysts wanted to make a connection between the two deals.

 

Stringer/Germany/Reuters Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-chief executive.

 

That link was reinforced when Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-chief executive, took a couple of shots at Salesforce during the conference call about the Hybris deal, saying Salesforce had bought an old-fashioned e-mail marketing company (yes, that’s old-fashioned now). Gartner, an industry research firm, recently announced that Salesforce had replaced SAP as the leading vendor of customer relationship management software, giving Mr. McDermott reason to want to get even.
The Salesforce deal, however, is part of a larger plan by Salesforce to blend advertising, marketing and sales. Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, has said that technologies like cloud computing and social media increasingly break down the distinctions between those things.
This is particularly true for customer relationship management of sales from one company to another, where complicated specs and contracts mean e-mail matters more.

SAP is going after consumers as much as businesses with Hybris and hoping to use the data from online commerce for Big Data marketing, and eventually, things like planning inventory and manufacturing. That is a much bigger goal, and ties into both SAP’s roots in enterprise resource planning software and the online data analysis of its HANA platform.

“You can read this purchase as us being serious” about customer relationship management,” said James Dever, a spokesman for SAP. “But it’s deeper than that. This touches a company’s back end transactional data,” or information about things like inventory.

One feature of Hybris’s software is that it allows customers to open an online shopping cart on one computer and then adjust an order later on another computer before closing a sale. Using its HANA platform, SAP hopes to let sellers see behaviors, then offer deals or companion offers before a sale is completed.

Eventually, companies may be able to use that overall information and data analysis to figure out faster how much of a product they need to make, store or sell quickly. The product could also help in planning what to stock in retail stores.

In some ways, the SAP deal is closer to last year’s move by NetSuite, another SAP rival, to offer online commerce services. While that business has been slow to emerge, NetSuite recently announced some significant deals involving blended online and traditional brick and mortar sales.
“The big picture is that consumers want to connect with companies on a personal, individualized basis, online and offline,” Zach Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, said.

In an even bigger picture, deals like this are part of the broader move to create the immediacy and data-led insight (or, if you prefer, cookie-based spying) of online retail with the high-touch experience of physical stores.

Amazon.com moved early into online skills and has edged into the physical world by offering fast delivery of goods. Apple has gone farther, designing stores that in many ways embody its online sales presence, from the minimalist look to the absence of formal checkout kiosks.
If SAP can build out Hybris, it could blur further the barriers between ads, sales and marketing. And more companies could break down barriers between things online and off.

Approyo Announces Hana Post Production Support

Approyo's always available PoC’s and support approach automatically allows the business process, end-user, application, datacenter and cloud perspectives, providing unmatched support across the entire Hana solution

PRLog (Press Release) - Oct 23, 2012 - 
NEW YORK, NY - October 23, 2012– Approyo the leader in SAP Hana business transaction-driven Proof of Concepts & Support offerings, today announced a new Post Production Support (PPS) solution to serve its growing client base in the Hana arena. The new (PPS) offering is part of a prestigious demand from the SAP eco-system customers, and key to the company's growth and strategy. Clients and partners such as SAP, CSC, and Booze Allen Hamilton just to name a few accounts have engaged Approyo for the solution.
Read more here...

SAP Hana POC's

SAP Hana POC Through the Cloud

Hana Proof of Concept NOW!
The Silver Lining® Cloud for your SAP Hana Proof of Concept allows you to jump right into your research without waiting for hardware or time to build an on-site system. You can immediately deliver capabilities to numerous staff members for assessment and acclimation. We designed our Silver Lining® solution to be seamless to your environment.

Sign up and go through a normal SAP log on GUI pad or on an Ipad or thru the web. You will have full Hana Studio access to a fully configured SAP Hana Cloud that allows you to grasp the new Hana solution, build upon knowledge needed in the complex issue of SAP, all while not having to install, service or support the solution.

Companies using SAP are engaged in evaluation, of the new Hana in memory solution. 

As companies strive to justify and leverage these investments, executive management is looking for the following –
• Reliability in testing for your POC
• ROI from the investment in new tools and applications (Try it before you buy it)
• Higher levels of acceptance, utilization and production from its user and technical communities

What is needed is the option to access a fully functional SAP Hana system where SAP users can construct Proof of Concept and Conference Room Pilot environments to experiment with this new SAP functionality – with full control and usability and no disruption to your production environment!  Approyo has invested over two years working hand in hand with SAP experts in creating a reliable, fully functional SAP Hana cloud solution to address this need.

This offering will enable any SAP client to access their own fully functional SAP Hana  environment for Proof of Concept and experimentation purposes.

Your “cloud” is highly secured and only accessed/used by your organization and requires NO internal resources (systems/ or technical staff) to utilize (Only to do a Hana Studio implementation).

This solution is intended for non-production utilization as an alternative to buying/supporting incremental servers whereby we handle the hosting of your Hana cloud instance –in 17 minutes!! As confirmed by select trial users of this offering, “the Silver Lining SAP Cloud Solution” adds tremendous value throughout the SAP POC process and is ideal for rapid, low-cost access to a fully functional Hana environment.

Contact Approyo to confirm your interest in deploying our Silver Lining SAP Hana cloud solution. We will discuss your interest and requirements for using the solution and provision your own SAP clouds. A POC term for Hana is typically been 90 days.

Companies today are adopting Hana to drive higher value to their users while stretching increasingly scarce IT dollars. Approyo is committed to assisting these companies in pursuit of this goal and strive to provide meaningful solutions that drive value into the SAP landscape.