As we navigate an unstable economy, organizations across industries want to be “future-ready,” and that requires systems and processes that can continuously evolve in response to the marketplace demands. For customers who run their operations on SAP, this means modernizing to a cloud ERP platform that supports greater flexibility and agility. However, this is a complex transformation and organizations need guidance on accelerating time to value.

SAP + IBM

With our 50-year partnership with SAP, IBM offers the combination of SAP-enabled transformation expertise via IBM Consulting and enterprise-grade cloud platform capabilities that help accelerate our client’s ERP modernization journey no matter where they’re currently deployed. Only IBM Cloud offers SAP-certified instances on Power and Intel x86 environments for SAP HANA deployments1. This flexibility to continue to run in Power or x86 environments can help accelerate cloud migration of your SAP workloads.

An IDC InfoBrief sponsored by IBM, Avoiding Cloud Migration Pitfalls for SAP2, found that clients who deployed SAP ERP on IBM Cloud were able to go live 20% faster as compared to other clouds:

Purpose-built SAP infrastructure

IBM Cloud provides a purpose-built SAP infrastructure. It has been leading the benchmarks of SAP ERP throughput performance since 2020 on IBM Power Virtual Server3 and SAP BWH analytics performance since 2021 on Intel Xeon environments4. This helps us meet clients where they are across Power and Intel deployments and modernize without infrastructure re-platforming, thus addressing security risk, cost and downtime.

Forrester Consulting interviewed clients who deployed SAP solutions globally on IBM Cloud as part of the IBM-commissioned 2023 Total Economic Impact study. They determined an ROI of 212% over 3 years for a composite organization based on interviewed customers who are running their SAP environments in IBM Cloud.

This is what one of the clients, an IT director in manufacturing, had to say about their move to IBM Cloud: “We need to grow [and] need [a solution that will] not have any bottleneck or constraint or surprise. This is why we put in place [IBM Cloud for SAP].”

Learn more

With IBM, clients also get managed services support to help them migrate to the cloud and manage their SAP landscape. IBM Consulting, a 2022 Gartner MQ leader in SAP S/4HANA Application Services, provides full transformation and end-to-end managed services. IBM offers a single control plane to provide managed services for RISE with SAP and supported non-RISE applications. This gives the flexibility to manage end-to-end workflows that include SAP and supported non-SAP applications in a multicloud environment. It also positions clients to transform at their own pace by doing a lift and shift of their existing SAP landscape to a RISE-ready cloud landscape.

If you want to learn more find me at IBM booth #200 at Sapphire or schedule a consult here.


1List of Certified IaaS platforms for SAP HANA

2IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by IBM, Avoiding Cloud Migration Pitfalls for SAP, doc #US49854922, December 2022

32.8x SAPS per core in Power Virtual Server compared to next best benchmark result

42.3x lower complex query runtime in IBM Cloud bare metal server compared to next best benchmark result

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