IBM cloud computing solutions are helping make the vision of on-demand SAP applications a reality for our joint customers

"IBM has taken cloud computing from something I daydream about to a reality." That is what an IBM customer recently said about his experience working with IBM cloud solutions. This reality of cloud computing for SAP applications starts with an understanding of what cloud computing is meant to achieve. The increasing functional scope of SAP products and the growing interconnection of business processes have led to fairly complex, inflexible IT environments that can hinder a company’s ability to quickly adapt to changing demands. The solution to this challenge is cloud computing.

Cloud computing provides a dynamic infrastructure that makes applications and computing power available on demand. It is highly optimized to achieve more with less, using virtualization, standardization and automation. Cloud computing helps companies become more agile and responsive while significantly reducing IT costs and complexity through improved workload optimization and service delivery.

IBM and SAP solutions capitalize on the comprehensive IBM portfolio of cloud computing offerings to provide integrated and seamless management across architectures and delivery models. Designed for enterprise-class customers, the IBM cloud computing portfolio covers:

• All cloud delivery models—including private clouds, hosted private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds built from combinations of other cloud types.
• A wide range of cloud-based services, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS)

Cloud solutions that are down to earth

IBM SmartCloud Application Services – A new platform-as-a-service that will give enterprises the cost and time savings of a cloud environment for a wide range of enterprise applications while maintaining a high level of control and security over deployment and access. A part of these application services is IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications. These new services automate the most common labor intensive tasks associated with managing SAP environments. The services catalog for SAP on the IBM SmartCloud provides for the automated provisioning of SAP environments and significantly reduces the cost and labor associated with SAP cloning, refreshes and patching. SAP services on the IBM SmartCloud provide production service levels and optional 24 / 7 DBA and SAP Basis support.

Benefits from our SAP in the Cloud service, include time savings such as:

• Install time of DB2 or Oracle database cut from 1 day to 12 minutes
• Maintain database libraries shrinks from 1/2 day to 8 minutes
• Clone a database drops from 2-3 days to 20 minutes
• Install of operating system reduced from 1 day to 30 minutes
• Prepare upgrade/provide SAP system down from 2-3 days to 40 minutes
• Add additional application server trimmed from 1 day to 10 minutes
• SAP systems refresh slashed from 1 – 4 days to 3 minutes

Other time improvements include

IBM has introduced and continues to grow a new smart business portfolio of cloud computing solutions that SAP clients can use today. Our portfolio also includes:

• IBM entry cloud configuration for SAP solutions on Power

  Provides an easy first step into implementing a self-managed SAP environment within a cloud. This solution provides a proven and prescriptive software configuration and hardware architecture that enables customers to quickly and easily execute basic scenarios, such as SAP instant provisioning.

• IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager

  Provides the service management system for cloud computing to help lower the cost of IT service delivery and deliver a higher degree of standardization and automation. Tivoli® Service Automation Manager is capable of supporting heterogeneous environments and enables the reuse of investments.

• IBM Smart Business Cloud - Enterprise

  Is an enterprise-class public cloud environment that offers a security rich self-service compute infrastructure with competitive pay-as-you-go pricing. SAP clients can extend their existing IT environments by deploying their SAP software for non-production use on the IBM Cloud to quickly realize cost savings and faster time to value, for development and test and other parts of their SAP workloads.

• IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+

  IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ complements and expands on the value of Enterprise, offering brand new capabilities and provides a core set of multi-tenant services to manage virtual server, storage, network and security infrastructure components including managed operational production services.

• IBM Hosting and application on demand (AoD) services for SAP

  Are provided at our hardened, fault-tolerant data centers, which have been designed to accommodate a very wide variety of application platforms and networking equipment. Our current North American AoD data centers are located in Sterling, VA and Mesa, AZ.

• SAP® CRM Rapid Deployment Solution on the IBM Cloud optimized by IBM DB2 and POWER7 (PDF, 227KB)

  Gain the essential business insights needed to connect with your target audience, coordinate marketing and sales, and provide outstanding customer service—nearly instantly and from anywhere in the world—using the power of cloud computing.

• SAP Supplier Relationship Management Application on the IBM Cloud Optimized By IBM DB2 and IBM POWER7 (PDF, 1.38MB)

  Under pressure to reduce supply costs while maintaining high quality output, companies are seeking greater efficiencies and savings from their procurement operations. The SAP® Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) application on the IBM® Cloud, optimized by the IBM DB2® database and IBM POWER7® servers, helps organizations like yours manage costs and drive efficiency and savings.

• IBM SmartCloud for SAP CRM Rapid Deployment Solution

  Gives you the flexibility to scale as your business grows, evolve into a full SAP CRM 7.0 solution on a private or public IBM SmartCloud solution or switch to a traditional on-premise IT model. The RDS combines SAP’s pre-configured CRM licenses and leverages IBM SmartCloud capabilities in a simple price per user monthly contract.