Executive summary
The goal - Control the unknown
The success of your SAP solution relies not only on the SAP application itself, but also on the larger infrastructure on which it runs. This infrastructure is highly complex, featuring various elements that interrelate with one another and include many unknown dependencies. All can affect the performance of your SAP solution. End-to-end management is needed, especially in a service environment. The IBM Tivoli® availability center for SAP provides the tools to monitor, diagnose and effectively manage your entire system.
The advantage - Comprehensive SAP management
IBM offers a single management portal from which you can monitor the performance and manage the availability of your entire SAP ecosystem, including SAP NetWeaver. The IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP:
- Delivers a clear, integrated view of SAP application performance to business units, such as accounting and human resources, from a role-based, single-portal interface.
- Lets you see all the end-to-end interdependencies between your resources that affect SAP performance.
- Enables you to identify potential problems before they affect your end users and your business.
- Provides a common toolset that helps you rapidly isolate and resolve problems.
- Reduces IT labor cost by providing integrated solutions that help team members work together to solve complex problems.
The benefits - Improve productivity
Business units that rely on SAP to support their applications—such as finance, logistics or corporate services—frequently lack a clear view into SAP application performance. End-user productivity and business performance suffer when problems and outages occur.
The added time it takes to detect, isolate, diagnose and resolve problems within the SAP landscape can mean lost revenue for the business. Any unplanned downtime in the SAP landscape can translate to lost revenue for a business. IBM Tivoli helps minimize this risk by detecting, isolating and diagnosing potential problems before it affects the business. The IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP can help bring visibility, control and automation to mission-critical SAP applications.
- Improve staff productivity through problem identification, isolation and resolution across business and IT organizations.
- Automate and simplify IT tasks such as deploying, provisioning, updating and troubleshooting hundreds of servers, allowing staff to focus on their main mission—enabling the business.
- Reduce cost of ownership by decreasing the time it takes to realize cost savings from SAP implementation and efficient operation.
Business view
The goal - Innovate and respond
Are you trying to improve collaboration and reduce labor costs in a dynamic business and technology environment? Is innovating your business and responding to challenges in a global economy critical to your growth? When revenues and productivity depend on the availability of SAP applications, you need the end-to-end management of your SAP landscape that the IBM Tivoli® availability center for SAP delivers.
The advantage - Enhance the capabilities of your SAP solutions
IBM offers proven expertise when it comes to supporting SAP systems used to build, run and manage your operation.
- IBM has an established relationship with SAP that spans more than 30 years and has resulted in more than 10,000 documented business successes in 138 countries across many industries.
- IBM is the largest implementer of SAP solutions, and we support this solution with a variety of consulting and implementation services.
- SAP is a leading provider of business software solutions with more than 43,000 customers in more than 120 countries. Many SAP customers are IBM customers as well.
- IBM is the only SAP partner to receive the coveted SAP Pinnacle Awards twice in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and three times in 2007—highlighting our alignment with SAP strategic initiatives.
- IBM Tivoli provides SAP customers with a broad portfolio of solutions that spans many areas, including monitoring, security, storage, asset management, relational database, provisioning, performance automation and more.
The benefits - Monitor business processes across the enterprise
The IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP monitors SAP business transactions and applications. By monitoring a broad range of transactions, the solution can help:
- Streamline operations and automate processes to improve productivity.
- Improve on-time delivery of products and services.
- Enable suppliers and dealers to perform transactions online.
- Integrate production, operations, design, manufacturing and management control processes.
- Provide expert advice to enable IT operations to resolve issues quickly without the need for experts.
- Provide operational managers and decision makers with timely, accurate information about inventory, sales, and profit and loss statements.
- Incorporate industry best practices into areas such as corporate governance, international reporting, global general ledger, recognized audit assurance, management control and decision making.
The approach - Firm builds efficient solution
A building materials group based in Europe with revenue of US$1.8 billion and operations in 39 countries found it difficult to supply information rapidly and cost-effectively. By using IBM System i5™ and IBM BladeCenter® servers to run IBM DB2® databases, the firm has created an easy-to-manage, highly reliable infrastructure capable of scaling for thousands of users.
As a result, centralized SAP applications deliver more accurate planning, financial and logistics information, which helps to reduce business costs. And new customer relationship management applications are delivering enhanced service to customers.
The financial advantage - Improve SAP efficiency
When revenues and productivity depend on the availability of SAP applications, you can benefit from the IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP. It offers a complete, integrated way to holistically manage SAP landscapes and underlying resources to help optimize SAP application availability and service quality. It monitors virtually all SAP components, including the underlying resources they rely on, in an end-to-end fashion. The solution also helps reduce:
- Manufacturing costs, while maintaining high levels of product quality.
- Procurement processing time and cost, while increasing revenue and customer satisfaction by maintaining service-level agreements.
- IT operating labor costs.
- The need for costly and hard to find subject matter experts to solve problems.
- Cycle time for key business processes such as hiring of new employees, financial close and supply chain management.
- Procurement processing time and cost.
- Production, inventory and distribution costs, while enhancing margins and cash flow.
Technical details
The issues - Simplify administration of your SAP ecosystem
For IT operations managers, managing SAP performance and disparate, heterogeneous systems involves substantial costs and IT hours. In addition, many administrators have to manually correlate information from third-party or homegrown management tools. The IBM Tivoli® availability center for SAP offers a single management portal from which you can monitor the performance and manage the availability of your entire SAP ecosystem. The solution is also a key cornerstone for implementing service-level management.
The benchmark - Increase plant capabilities
The IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP is built on Tivoli software, which supports the IBM Service Management Model, a scalable, modular approach used to deliver more efficient and effective services to your business.
- The Tivoli service management platform is backed by world-class IBM services, IBM support and an active ecosystem of IBM Business Partners.
- Tivoli customers can also leverage one another’s best practices by participating in independently run IBM Tivoli User Groups around the world.
- By automating the integration of business services—known as service management—Tivoli can help ensure compliance with parameters set by Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), Basel II and other mandates, which can require accountability for how resources are used and how sensitive data is accessed and stored.
The components - SAP management made easy
The IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP brings together powerful IBM software products that help ensure the availability and performance of your SAP system.
- IBM Tivoli Monitoring software monitors the performance of the resources that underlie your SAP environment, as well as the SAP database. You can use the integrated information from Tivoli Monitoring software to help manage and optimize availability.
- IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager software helps you understand overall SAP application health; detect, analyze and repair SAP application server performance issues; and manage SAP-related Web services.
- IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager automates discovery of SAP systems and their dependencies and interrelationships.
Together, these tools provide a centralized way to discover the components and interrelationships of the SAP system and monitor the following:
- SAP applications and transactions, SAP Computing Center Management System (CCMS) alert reporting and SAP NetWeaver components
- SAP application servers (NetWeaver)
- Supporting databases including Oracle, IBM DB2 and SQL
- J2EE™ transactions on SAP NetWeaver Portal and SAP NetWeaver
- Servers and operating systems, including IBM AIX®, HP-UX, mainframes and Microsoft® Windows®
- Web servers, including Apache, Microsoft IIS and IBM HTTP Server
- Front-end Web resources, such as the customer GUI, and end user response time
- Attached devices, such as printers and routers
IBM consulting services help you establish a strategy that can lead to a fully functioning solution—and then implement it. The following services can help you leverage best practices for designing and implementing SAP solutions that are based on successful customer engagements around the world.
- Three to five day workshop to establish readiness
- Twenty-five to thirty day services engagement to install and configure software for customer environment
- Identification of five key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Instrumentation of KPIs and display of the health of SAP on Tivoli Enterprise Portal
The combination of the included products and the services can help organizations automate and simplify IT tasks related to their SAP environment, allowing staff to focus on their main mission of enabling the business, while also reducing the total cost of ownership through faster time to value.
The implementation - Retailer builds a solid IT foundation
A leader in the field of industrial automation and safety, based in Germany, wanted to consolidate their SAP servers to a strategic technology platform that would allow the company to exploit server partitioning and virtualization. The challenge was to find a cost-efficient way to protect data and deliver very high system availability. IBM and SAP developed a solution that not only protects data with new mirroring techniques, but also actively manages the SAP applications and infrastructure to provide enhanced reliability. Two IBM System p5™ 550 servers have been clustered for high availability with IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms.
The cost of ownership - Accelerate project execution
To speed implementation of the IBM Tivoli availability center for SAP, IBM Global Technology Services consultants install and configure the solution to meet your business objectives.
We draw on a broad range of capabilities and a comprehensive portfolio of business and IT consulting services. In addition, we offer:
- Intellectual capital and proven templates and examples to help speed project execution.
- Predictable and reliable project management with driven results, so you can get it right the first time.
- Deep experience managing a global, heterogeneous, multi-sourced infrastructure with both large and small data centers to help protect your SAP infrastructure investment.
