Building tomorrow’s sustainable growth

What’s next? Bosch is committed to setting an even higher bar for energy-efficient operations by enabling greater sustainability across its business. By moving its SAP solutions to next-generation IBM Power10 servers, Bosch is fostering the development of game-changing internet-of-things (IoT) solutions while slashing data center energy usage by 20%—taking its green strategy to the next level. 

From consumer goods, mobility solutions, industrial technology, and energy and building services, Bosch is building next-generation, always-connected IoT products that will transform our daily lives. At the same time, Bosch recognizes that a very different kind of transformative process is underway: climate change. By going carbon neutral, Bosch is making a specific contribution to the internationally agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

The organization aimed to play its role in tackling one of the single greatest challenges facing humanity without sacrificing the razor-sharp competitive edge that helped it become a household name. Pushing the boundaries of fields such as IoT and AI while further reducing its carbon footprint was no simple task. 

The Bosch IT function is central to the group strategy around IoT, AI, digital profitability, customer intimacy, resilience—and environmental protection. After achieving its goal to become fully carbon neutral in 2020, the organization wanted to extract even greater efficiency from every aspect of its operations, including the vital SAP business systems that help thousands of Bosch associates work productively every day. 

Bosch’s SAP infrastructure team provides SAP solutions and related services to all the company’s business sectors, with a lean team supporting a vast, interconnected network of global operating companies at more than 60 countries and 400 locations. The solution landscape includes SAP R/3, SAP HANA® and SAP S/4HANA® systems. As part of enterprise-wide digital transformation, and as support for older SAP R/3 draws to a close, Bosch is moving to SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA, which places new demands on the IT infrastructure. 

Christian Dümmler, Senior Manager responsible for global SAP infrastructure at Bosch, confirms: “SAP HANA represents the newest range of products and technologies from SAP, offering the latest developments and capabilities—crucial to helping us stay at the forefront of our industry. SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA are where Bosch wants to be.” 

Today, many enterprise IT departments respond to business requests for additional SAP services simply by deploying additional servers. However, to meet its strict efficiency targets, Bosch takes a more innovative approach. 

As part of its ongoing IT optimization effort, Bosch deploys IBM Power Enterprise Pools, a technology that enables workload to be dynamically allocated to available compute capacity, maximizing efficiency. Dümmler states, “Currently, some 70% of systems are assigned to Power Enterprise Pools, creating a private cloud environment where Bosch enjoys the flexibility of resource combined with the security and data governance in its own datacenters.” 

Wherever possible, Bosch takes advantage of Power Enterprise Pools to share resources, compute cores and memory across the landscape to help optimize operations. For example, rather than buy servers dedicated to a specific SAP solution, Bosch can assign cores from a Power Enterprise Pool. If a business sector demands greater performance, Power Enterprise Pools gives Bosch the flexibility to allocate workload as needed rather than dedicate a single machine that might be busy at one moment and idle the next. 

Vince Michaelis, Senior Expert responsible for the global SAP infrastructure at Bosch, explains: “By sharing resources, Bosch achieves around 90% processor utilization rate. From both load-sharing and sustainability perspectives, Power Enterprise Pools makes it easy to move jobs to Power10 at their lower energy cost even as we deliver better performance. The result? We can satisfy ever-growing business appetites for analytics while keeping our environmental footprint light.” 

IBM strives to be more than an IT vendor, cultivating strong, mutually beneficial relationships with enterprises all over the world. Over many decades, Bosch and IBM have forged a close alliance, which continues to evolve and deepen.  

Most recently, IBM invited Bosch to participate in the Power10 Early Support Program. To assess the business advantages of the new Power10 servers, Bosch completed standardized performance tests on its Oracle database for SAP R/3 systems, covering a wide range of small to large workloads, including highly parallelized sessions.  

The ultimate intention is to move the SAP HANA applications for all the Bosch business units to Power10 servers, all running the SUSE Linux® Enterprise Server (link resides outside of ibm.com) operating system. 

“Our customers are fully satisfied by the Power10 platform,” says Dümmler. “From the moment we onboarded our first customer to E1080 we saw processing performance gains, and improvements of roughly 50% in response times. Some customers remarked on how quickly their tasks were completed and were very happily surprised. In fact, even if in future we average only half that improvement, this will be a huge performance gain for every SAP HANA and SAP R/3 customer on Power10, enabling significantly greater business productivity.” 

As a global company with operations in more than 60 countries, Bosch complies with data governance regulations from many jurisdictions. With duties to ensure data is retained safely and securely, often with specific requirements on physical data locations, Bosch uses cloud technology in its own data center, distributed globally.  

IBM Power10 includes new encryption functionality that the Bosch team intends to exploit as part of streamlining its data management capabilities. The IBM Power10 servers are engineered to achieve significantly faster encryption performance, with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines per core.  

Michaelis comments, “The built-in Power10 security technology will enable us to build new solutions without additional evaluation, deployment, and license costs.”

As Bosch continues on its sustainability journey, the company sees that its ongoing digital transformation with IBM will play an important part in unlocking new efficiencies. In fact, the company is already looking ahead at the optimizations that Power10 enables.  

With such a lean team supporting nearly 400,000 associates, service automation is high on the agenda. Bosch uses both IBM Business Automation Workflow and the Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform (link resides outside of ibm.com). Together, these solutions enable automated provisioning, deployment, and management of compute infrastructure, along with workflow orchestration, application deployment, configuration management and security threat response. 

Dümmler explains: “We are developing around 300 Ansible playbooks for managing, patching, quality assessments and related daily administration tasks in a Bosch-wide project that contributes directly to our cloud journey. Combined with IBM Business Automation Workflow for system ordering and provisioning, these solutions ensure we can provide highly responsive, resilient systems for our Bosch customers.” 

In addition, Bosch is considering the IBM Power Virtual Server offering for its future infrastructure strategy, which may include hybrid cloud. Next steps will include a proof of concept for IBM Power Virtual Server, which will enable the company to access all the features and capabilities of the IBM Power platform as a cloud service. This approach provides the security, resilience and performance of the IBM Power platform combined with the scalability, flexibility, and capacity of cloud solutions, with scalable virtual servers available on demand.