Supporting SAP with a complex IT landscape can be costly—in terms of money, service degradation and lost efficiency. IT simplification can help avoid these issues.

Over time, many SAP systems have grown into complex, expensive and difficult to maintain landscapes. Companies today need to align their IT infrastructure to better support service delivery, but in many cases their existing technology has become an inhibitor—not an enabler—of flexibility. Their challenge is to reduce the cost of IT while enhancing their system’s ability to serve the business. The answer? A simplified, yet dynamic, infrastructure.

IBM infrastructure solutions for SAP provide a comprehensive architecture to simplify your SAP IT infrastructure to achieve savings in the areas of technology acquisition, management, maintenance and operations. The architecture is designed to improve performance and deliver the business flexibility you need, while taking advantage of the technology investments in SAP that you’ve already made. IT simplification, enabled by IBM, can result in:

• Fewer servers, storage and networking equipment to buy, maintain and operate.
• Fewer software licenses to purchase and manage.
• One integrated system that connects heterogeneous applications enterprise wide.
• A centralized means of managing all business processes.
• A single integrated set of tools to manage applications.
• A consistent front-end system for users to access the business applications required for their role.

But where do you start? IBM offers proven services to help optimize your SAP landscape to keep your business running at peak performance.

• The IBM Insight for SAP utility program and its analysis and reporting service provide a convenient, high-level workload analysis for in-production SAP system landscapes. This utility and service are provided free of charge by IBM America's Advanced Technical Support and America's Techline organizations.
• The IBM SAP Healthcheck (PDF, 32KB) provides comprehensive recommendations for optimizing your use of SAP to support your business strategy and reduce the total cost of ownership.

In addition, IBM offers a range of products and solutions to help you simplify your IT infrastructure:

• IBM Systems and SAP
• Upgrade your SAP systems
• IBM Tivoli® availability center for SAP
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for enterprise resource planning