SAP on Google Cloud

Currently, few enterprises function without a centralized resource and process management system. Collecting and analyzing data as well as monitoring the course of operations facilitate a multitude of optimizations. You no longer have to limit our perspective to a narrow section of the company. Instead, you can have an overview of the entire organization, and focus on all intersections between company’s departments. ERP systems, SAP being the most common one, are used to manage such processes. And combined with the capabilities of the public cloud – scalability, efficiency and high availability – they allow you to achieve even more. Let’s dive into the capabilities that SAP on Google Cloud offers.

What is ERP?

ERP is an abbreviation of Enterprise Resources Planning. This is a group of integrated IT systems that support – as the name suggests – resource planning and control of enterprise management processes. The ERP system can be present in any area of the organization:

supply chain management,
managing production processes,
distribution (logistics, storage, supply and demand),
accounting,
human resources management,
customer relationship management,
and sales (forecasts, planning, placing orders).

All information is included in an integrated database. This way, data from one area is available almost immediately to employees of another department, and comprehensive reports facilitate strategic decision-making.

The most popular ERP software providers include:

Comarch (on the Polish market),
Oracle,
Infor,
RealPage,
Xero,
SAP.

SAP – the market leader

SAP SE is a German company founded in 1972 that creates software for enterprises. The name SAP comes from the words Systems, applications and products in data processing, which means in English Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing.

SAP Business Technology Platform currently maintains over 200 products that cater to company needs across industries and segments. The SAP environment includes:

SAP HANA – a relational database management system used to retrieve and store data in accordance with application requirements, enabling advanced analytics, including predictive analytics,
SAP S/4HANA – an ERP system for large enterprises that covers all daily processes from every area of the corporation. It is optimized for effective use of the SAP HANA database system,
SAP ERP – scalable resource planning software that adapts to the size and requirements of the company, supporting many areas (including supply chain, services, purchasing, sales, finance, human resources),
SAP Business One – ERP system dedicated to small and medium-sized companies or branches of larger enterprises,
SAP Concur – software supporting the management of business trips, company cards, ticket payments, fuel and accommodation expenses – from the moment the employee submits the application to the moment of full settlement of the trip,
SAP Commerce Cloud – an application that integrates digital and physical customer contact points, enabling omnichannel service,
SAP Success Factors Employee Central – a platform aggregating all information related to human resources management, HR processes and HR issues.

Advantages of SAP software in your company

The SAP landscape offers a suite of services that provide unparalleled advantages for businesses worldwide. From seamless SAP deployments to optimizing SAP workloads, SAP empowers organizations to unlock value and drive innovation.

With SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) and SAP Data Intelligence, organizations can streamline operations, optimize development and deployment of new products and services, and eliminate data duplication. They can also harness best practices, ensuring that businesses can run SAP with confidence and reliability.

The most important advantages that SAP customers enjoy include:

Monitoring processes and dependencies, even between distant departments in the organization;
Efficient flow of information and better cooperation, through immediate access to data from any place and device;
Cost savings, stemming from using one ecosystem instead of integrating several;
Analysis and reporting tools, unified for each process;
Data security and access control, as well as cyclical backups of critical and sensitive data;
System scalability;
Flexibility, by adapting the software to the company’s requirements;
Choice of infrastructure: freedom to choose the type of data center in which you will run the program. This may be a set of your own physical machines (on-premise infrastructure), dedicated servers or public servers in the cloud. By choosing the latter solution, you can expand your company’s software with cloud solutions, and leverage hundreds of ready-made services.

Need for resilient infrastructure

To use the full potential of the digital transformation that SAP provides, it must be installed on an efficient, scalable and highly available infrastructure. Hosting in a company’s own data centers may turn out to be insufficient and lead to:

Slower data updating;
Slow report generation;
Difficulties in expanding the system;
Longer deployments;
No scaling and slower performance;
Slowdowns and interruptions;
Relatively high maintenance cost;
Extra expenses on disaster recovery plan plan.

Google Cloud – solutions for SAP systems

Google Cloud is not only server space, but also a trusted partner with a set of nearly 200 services that can be used to create infrastructure tailored to individual business needs. The services are scalable and managed, run on-demand, and cost per use on a per-second or per-minute basis.

Google Cloud is one of SAP partners that provides infrastructure solutions suitable for all SAP systems. By taking advantage of the joint solutions from both SAP and Google Cloud, your company can leverage the joint solutions of cloud innovation and insights as well as SAP expertise and insights in enterprise management.

Certified machines and OS

Google Cloud has dozens of virtual machines and Bare Metal Solution machines certified by SAP for production use. These are among others:

VMs N1 high-memory
VMs N2 high-memory,
VMs M1 memory-optimized,
VMs M2 memory-optimized,
O2 memory-optimized Bare Metal Solution

and operating systems:

RHEL for SAP, versions 7.3, 7.4, 7.6, 7.7, 8.1,
SLES for SAP, versions: 12 SP3, 12 SP4, 12 SP5, 15, 15 SP1, 15 SP2.

Here is a list of machines with their specifications.

Scalable infrastructure

Flexible cloud infrastructure enables vertical and horizontal scaling as the company grows and its needs increase. The services automatically adjust to the current load, so you do not incur costs for unused, redundant resources.

Stability of the solution

Google Cloud guarantees SLA for its services at the level of 99.95-99.99%. Additionally, the Compute Engine virtual machine service has built-in features such as live migration and automatic restart in the event of an instance error. These minimize downtime related to maintenance or even failure in the Google data center.

Efficient network

Thanks to its own network, Google is able to transmit and process data faster (transmission speed reaches 10Tbs). This translates to greater efficiency at the same or lower costs.

Improved analytics

The Google Cloud portfolio of services includes numerous cloud databases (including Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, Firestore), services enabling the construction of your own data warehouse (BigQuery), data lakes (Dataproc, Cloud Storage), stream analysis ( Dataflow, Pub/Sub), as well as Business Intelligence solutions (BigQuery BI Engine, Connected Sheets, Data Studio). GCP also offers pre-trained machine learning and artificial intelligence models that allow you to better analyze data and make predictions.

Reducing your carbon footprint

All Google Cloud data centers are powered by renewable energy. By migrating your SAP system to the Google cloud, you reduce your organization’s carbon footprint.

SAP migration strategies to Google Cloud

Google distinguishes four strategies for moving SAP systems to its cloud infrastructure:

move – moving the application to the cloud without making any changes,
migrate – as part of the migration, the operating system and/or database are changed,
transform – in addition to changing the operating system or database, modifications are also made to the application,
reimplement – migrating the most important elements of the application to the cloud and its further expansion in the cloud.

Companies that have decided to migrate to the Google Cloud environment value the efficiency and expediency of performing analyses, increasing the level of availability and minimizing downtime.

IDC’s research conducted among SAP and Google Cloud Platform users shows that:

GCP completes queries 63% faster than other infrastructure solutions,
shortens the waiting time for reports and analysis results by 77%,
reduces data operations and storage costs by 52% (over three years),
increases the 3-year return on investment in a data warehouse by 323%,
increases the efficiency of IT teams by 56%.

Rodan + Fields: x4 scaling in minutes

Rodan + Fields is a company producing and selling cosmetics that cooperates with over 300,000. contractors. They manage all processes in SAP, which is located on the Google Cloud infrastructure – supply chain, finance, stationary sales and via the e-commerce platform.

Before they started using GCP, it took them days, sometimes weeks, to scale in response to increased demand. With Google Cloud Platform, they can scale their infrastructure up to four times in 5 minutes.

https://youtu.be/vTPAyxCj2DE

ATB Financial: Platform speed increased 117 times

ATB Financial is a Canadian bank employing over 5,000 specialists who serve approx. 800,000 people. customers. The company knows that data is their most important resource because it allows them to better prepare products and offers that meet customer needs. By migrating SAP to Google Cloud Platform and using BigQuery’s reporting and machine learning engagement capabilities, the ATB Financial platform runs 117 times faster than it ran on the previous infrastructure.

Southwire: 24/7 continuous operation of over 30 factories

Southwire is a company that has been producing wires and cables for 70 years – one of the leading companies in the manufacturing segment in the United States. Before they started using Google Cloud Platform, it took them weeks to set up and run a production environment; now it takes just minutes. Additionally, the GCP infrastructure is capable of processing petabytes of data without the risk of system overload, allowing all Southwire factories to operate uninterrupted.

SAP migration to the cloud with the support of a Google Cloud partner

Are you considering moving your current ERP system to the Google Cloud? Do it with the support of certified FOTC engineers and architects. We provide not only substantive and technical support – we are also able to cover part of the costs of maintaining the cloud infrastructure.

Find out more and receive a free assessment of your infrastructure. Contact our cloud engineers.