More and more enterprise customers are realizing the benefits of moving their core business applications to the cloud. Many have moved beyond the conversation of “why cloud” to “which cloud provider.” Customers want the assurance of performance, privacy and scale for their mission critical applications. Microsoft Azure sets the bar for scale and performance, leads in compliance and trust measure, and offers the most global reach of any public cloud. Specifically for SAP workloads, our strong partnership with SAP enables us to provide our mutual customers best-in-class support for their most demanding enterprise applications.
We’ve invested deeply to ensure that Azure is the best public cloud for our customers’ SAP HANA workloads. Azure provides the most powerful and scalable infrastructure of any public cloud provider for HANA. Azure also offers customers the ability to extract more intelligence from their SAP solution environments with AI and analytics, and our broad, longstanding partnership with SAP includes integrations with Office 365 to help customer enhance productivity, too. Lastly, we have an enormous partner ecosystem ready to help enterprises succeed with SAP solution workloads.
I’m pleased to announce several new advancements to this key area of focus:
Support for running some of the largest public cloud estates of SAP HANA, across both virtual machines and Large Instance offerings.
To power SAP HANA and other high-end database workloads, we’re introducing M-Series virtual machines powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v3 that support single node configurations up to 3.5TB memory. This will allow customers to quickly spin up a new virtual machine to test a new business process scenario and turn it off when the testing is done to avoid incurring additional costs.
Real-time, transactional business applications need scale up power within a single node. For customers using OLTP landscapes like SAP S/4HANA or SoH that go beyond the limits of today’s hypervisors, we’re announcing a range of new SAP HANA on Azure Large Instance SKUs, powered by Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4 from 4TB to 20TB memory.
SAP business warehousing environments that harness and capture intelligence from massive volumes of data require multi-node, scale-out systems. We’re introducing support for SAP HANA Large instances up to 60TB memory for potential future use for applications like SAP BW, and SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Cloud Platform: SAP’s platform-as-a-service offering is now available as a public preview hosted on Microsoft Azure. Customers can take advantage of the pre-built SAP Cloud Platform components to build business applications while leveraging the broader toolset of Azure services.
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: In cooperation with SAP, we are working to make Azure available as a deployment option for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAP’s secure managed cloud offering. Customers will benefit from Azure’s enterprise-proven compliance and security, in addition to close connections between their other Azure workloads and SAP solutions running on Azure in SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.
SAP and Azure Active Directory Single-Sign-On: SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication Services are now integrated with Azure Active Directory. This integration enables customers to implement friction-free, web-based, single-sign-on capabilities across all SAP solutions that integrate with SAP Cloud Platform Identity Authentication. In addition, SAP SaaS solutions (e.g. Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.), as well as core SAP NetWeaver-based solutions or SAP HANA, are integrated with Azure Active Directory.
Last year, Satya Nadella took the stage at SAPPHIRE, announcing a new era of partnership with SAP – and at the time we shared that early adopters, Coats LLC and Rockwell Automation, were using Azure Large Instance infrastructure to run their SAP solution environments. Since then, we’ve seen tremendous momentum with customers choosing to deploy SAP on Azure. Just a few examples of the companies deciding on Azure as their cloud platform for SAP solution landscapes are:
Accenture: This is the largest business warehousing SAP HANA deployment in the public cloud, running Accenture’s own mission-critical financial reporting systems on Azure. For more about Accenture’s use of Azure, don’t miss their session at SAPPHIRE NOW’17 this week.
Pact Group: By choosing to migrate their on-premises SAP servers to Azure, this Asia-Pacific packaging company anticipates annualized savings of 20 percent with their business now running more than 90% of its applications and compute on Azure.
Mosaic: One of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and potash crop nutrients moved all its global financial, commercial, and supply-chain SAP systems to Azure, increasing speed and agility. The company anticipates a year over year cost savings of 20 percent.
IXOM: When they needed to separate from their parent company, water treatment and chemical distributor IXOM chose to move its SAP applications to Microsoft Azure, taking a cloud-first approach to the future.
Subsea7: This world-leading seabed-to-surface engineering, construction and services contractor is working with Accenture to unlock cost savings and greater efficiencies through SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA hosted on Azure. Subsea 7 aims to deliver a simpler, faster and more tightly integrated landscape to its global employees, providing more mobility, agility and an enhanced user experience.
One of the key advantages of Azure is that customers can drive intelligence and insights from their SAP solution environments by integrating with solutions like Power BI and Cortana Intelligence, powering new business opportunities and efficiencies.
Our integration partners are a critical part of SAP solutions on Azure deployments as they help ensure customer success, leveraging their skill and expertise across both the Microsoft and SAP ecosystems. At SAPPHIRE NOW’17, Microsoft will host some of our top Global System Integrator partners including Accenture, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro to showcase the value and operational improvements each of these organizations can provide to customers looking to deploy SAP on Azure.
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
Wednesdays With Will: Do You Have A Business Process?
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
I recently met up with a friend of mine who owns a small but growing business. He was telling how when the business had less than 10 employees things seemed so much simpler. Everyone wore multiple hats and they just figured it out as they went along. They must have been doing something right because before he knew it they had doubled in staff. As they approached 15-20 employees, he realized they couldn’t do things as they had in the past. Roles became more defined and the need to put processes in place became essential. Like most entrepreneurs, he was more of a visionary than a process implementer. For that reason, he hired a management consultant firm to help him develop processes for his expanding business.
Though the management consulting firm helped him in multiple areas of his business, my friend was most proud of his newly developed sales process. They hadn’t had a formalized process in the past and pretty much left it up to each salesperson to figure it out on their own. Once again this was fine when they only had 2 or 3 sales people but as the business continued to grow and their sales team approached 8-10 people there were need for some standardization. His goal was to help his sales team open more opportunities and achieve a higher success rate from those opportunities. He was also thinking about how he could simplify the onboarding process for a new hire and reduce the amount of time it would take to get them up to speed. Having a sales process in place would allow him to accomplish both outcomes.
My friend is aware of my passion for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. The management consultant recommended they start using one to reinforce the processes that had been developed for them. I couldn’t agree more. What is the value of developing a process if you have no way to ensure it stays in place? I told him how Microsoft Dynamics CRM has had an “out-of-the-box” business process built into it since the 2013 version. Every business has its own unique sales process and Microsoft has accounted for this. You have the ability to customize the business process to match your business’s need. Analytics provided by Dynamics CRM would allow you to adjust your business process if need be as well.
Here’s a short video showing you what the business process looks like in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:
As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
Wednesdays with Will: Making Your Business Intelligent
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
You are a Business Owner or Operations Manager who is always looking for a way to improve efficiencies in your organization. Recently you heard about Office 365 and were wondering if it would be the right fit for you and your employees. There are a few reasons why you are considering it. You realize your 5 year old email server has seen better days. It hasn’t been functioning as it should and is possibly costing you business because employees are not able to send and receive email communications internally and externally as they should. You also realize that the version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc...) is not the same throughout your organization so additional time is needed by employees to change formatting when sharing and opening documents. This costs the company time and causes frustration for your employees. Your workforce is becoming more mobile and some of your employees work remotely from the office. Last but not least, you are looking for an easier way to collaborate on the latest version of documents and spreadsheets. For these reasons and possibly more, you decided it was time to look for a way to improve your situation.
Microsoft Office 365 is typically considered because it is a versatile solution that can address these individual scenarios or all of them. This means you can just use the parts you need such as Exchange (Email, Contacts, Calendaring), Office Pro Plus (the current version of Office Suite), Skype for Business (IM, Presence, Video Conferencing), SharePoint (Intranet Portal, Document Storage) or more. It doesn’t require additional hardware and you can add each piece of the solution as needed. This allows you to easily operationalize your costs while providing your employees the latest tools to be successful in their job. Under this model, Microsoft is now able to revise and improve the product more frequently at no additional cost. This also improves user experience and adoption because the changes now are much more subtle and less drastic to a complete version change.
Microsoft recently extended its Office 365 Platform to include Dynamics CRM. If you are not familiar with Dynamics CRM or what a CRM is in general, let me tell you why you’ll want to know. The most basic description for a CRM is that it’s a business intelligence tool that can be leveraged by your Sales, Marketing, Services, and Management teams improving customer engagement and customer experience. This will help your organization generate more business and improve client satisfaction. The analytics gathered will also allow you to maneuver more fluidly with the changes in the businesses you work with as well as the current environment. Over the next few weeks I will be taking a deeper dive into:
How Dynamics CRM integrates with Office 365
How Dynamics CRM is used in each team setting (Sales, Marketing, Services, & Management)
How Dynamics CRM is used by different industries
Hopefully you enjoyed my article and if you’d like to read more you can follow me here. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
