Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Towards digital transformation

Sandeep Kapoor, Senior Director

A weekend visit to the NTUC FairPrice supermarket chain based in Singapore showcases its popularity. Being one of the major retail stores in Singapore, it was a couple of years ago that NTUC decided to embark on the journey of cashless revolution. NTUC chose to migrate to the in-memory computing platform SAP HANA and needed an SAP partner to deliver an end-to-end solution integrating hardware, software, and IT management services. To remain lean and agile while building sustainable growth for the future, NTUC collaborated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to help it design, develop, and deploy an end-to-end solution. “Usually this would have taken 12 to 18 months, but through our services, sales teams, and by working very closely with NTUC, we were able to shrink their migration to less than six months,” elaborates Sandeep Kapoor, Senior Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This is the story of one of just 25,000 customers of the joint alliance of HPE and SAP. Because, when it comes to running SAP through a hybrid IT deployment model, it has become a no-brainer—over the last three decades— HPE has established itself as the trusted partner, enabling organizations to start small and scale infinitely. According to Kapoor, SAP HANA is a revolutionary shift in providing both business application and big data solutions to enhance company’s business processes, and HPE can ensure an organization’s successful migration to a real-time enterprise.

"To propel companies further and faster towards becoming a data-driven organization." That has been the motto behind the three-decade-long alliance between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP. Through the alliance, the company empowers its clients to be well-positioned to capitalize on disruptive technologies at their disposal, including Big Data, and cloud-native apps--turning ideas into reality faster scaling further from the competition.

Accelerating the Journey

Today, most organizations that are embracing SAP technology to manage their vast collection of actionable data effectively, struggle to utilize to its full potential. Enterprises are mainly concerned about finding a way to extract and analyze key data.

SAP HANA is a revolutionary shift in providing both business application and big data solutions, and HPE ensures an organization’s successful migration to a real-time enterprise

While SAP HANA has gained tremendous market interest and adoption, there are several challenges that hinder the journey to SAP HANA for customers who want to accelerate their adoption of SAP HANA such as infrastructure, achieving mission-critical enterprise-class deployment, skills gap in execution, migration and implementation risks and the need to balance faster insights against IT spend and TCO.

With over 2,500 HANA customers and over 12,000 HANA installations, HPE accelerates an organization’s SAP HANA journey through their computing solutions. HPE is the leading SAP HANA platform vendor with approximately 48 percent of the market. Across a spectrum of industries—the trusted alliance of HPE and SAP proffers comprehensive solutions that help customers to transform to a hybrid infrastructure through data center modernization, protect the digital enterprise using SAP software and services, empower organizations using analytics powered by SAP S/4HANA, among others. A recent report from prominent IT research firm informed that “HPE has top rank as leading vendor for Vision and ability to execute in magic quadrant for Integrated System”.

HPE possesses 3 kinds of deployment models to meet customer needs and optimal choice. These three models are Appliance, Base configuration, and TDI (Tailored Datacenter Integration). The first model i.e. Appliance is optimized for maximum performance, designed to meet stringent SLAs and run mission critical workloads, standardized and highly optimized for SAP HANA and also Pre-integrated and certified. The Base configuration is the increased flexibility of TDI but with simplified ordering. It has the same hardware configuration and SAP certification as appliance and its bare metal configuration enables custom OS installation as well. Lastly, the TDI (Tailored Datacenter Integration) configures flexibility within the framework defined by SAP. It also re-uses existing or preferred compute, storage or networking components.

Further, HPE offers enterprise-grade software to enable SAP HANA deployments to meet mission-critical requirements of the clients.

The industry-proven HPE Serviceguard offers mission-critical high availability and disaster recovery protection with automatic failover capability to ensure continued uninterrupted availability. The HPE consultant acts as your single point of contact to integrate HPE Serviceguard with SAP HANA System Replication, ensuring the solution is configured according to your requirements and aligns with HPE’s and SAP’s recommendations and best practices. HPE Serviceguard— as Kapoor mentions—can provide Smart quorum solution which intelligently handles quorum with workload-aware priority to avoid un-necessary failover, No other vendors offer this feature.

By combining SAP S/4HANA with HPE migration and cloud expertise, HPE has demonstrated its commitment to providing customers with simplicity and choice for their journey to the digital economy.

Thinking Two Steps Ahead

HPE in partnership with SAP offers service-led, asset-powered and end-to-end solutions. The alliance provides predictive solutions to problems that even a client might not know off. The team at HPE believes that they anticipate where the digital enterprise is going next, and is aiding companies get there quickly, with low risk. The team delivers future-proof solutions by starting each customer journey with in-depth assessment services and then backs it up by leveraging its unique full-stack approach—backed by differentiated choice—to move from idea to strategy to solution.

With over 3,500 dedicated HPE SAP experts and a customer-accessible robust SAP Center of Excellence, HPE offers services to ensure a successful SAP HANA journey for their clients. The firm’s services include preparing and planning, deployment and migration, supporting, and optimizing services, which allows clients to cherish the collective benefits offered by the most accomplished SAP partnerships in the business.

Riding on the wave of partnership excellence, Kapoor believes that the company is well positioned to lead the cloud computing industry through its portfolio of services and is intending to make the hybrid IT simple. As, SAP is shaping its vision for future by heading in the direction of IoT, it’s now pushing its customers into its next-generation cloud platform—Leonardo. HPE resonates with this vision of SAP and is thus working towards building a common framework and program to help customers steer into the future with Leonardo.

- Annie Johnson
December 29, 2017