SAP SAPPHIRE Wrap-Up: Resilience

In the past few months, every event that I’m aware of has had to significantly change how it’s delivered to its participants. SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2020 was no exception.  Although day 1 will be remembered largely for technical glitches during the keynote address, SAP showed true resilience in the remaining days of the conference. Great content. Great speakers. And – ahem – great sponsors.

From my perspective, SAP S/4HANA and the cloud shared center stage. That makes sense. With SAP looking to move its Business Suite customers on AnyDB to S/4HANA on HANA by 2027, and all the benefits that move will bring, there should be a lot of emphasis on S/4HANA. Cloud is, well, cloud. Although few customers on, or moving to, HANA will go “cloud only,” many are looking at how the cloud can be part of, or compliment, their traditional SAP landscapes.  Hmmm, sounds a lot like hybrid multicloud. 

Here’s another example of resilience that I’d like to share with you. NetApp was honored to be a partner in TasNetworks transition to SAP HANA. Rather than tell you about them, I’ll let them speak for themselves about NetApp and their move to SAP HANA. “TasNetworks was the first organization in Australia to virtualize SAP HANA, for good reason,” said Liam Cole, IT Commercial Operations Team Leader at TasNetworks. “Our unique challenge, being located far away from mainland Australia, has meant that we’ve always been reliant on resilient, self-sufficient technology. SAP HANA has been key to our productivity, and thanks to FlexPod® from NetApp and Cisco, we’ve never had any thoughts or concerns about performance, ever. There are no restrictions for our customers or applications that we can’t run. We trust NetApp to deliver the software features that we need, and our ability to refresh, clone, and run back environments quickly saved us over six figures during development.”

Speaking of letting our customers tell compelling stories, as it turns out, SAP is also a NetApp customer. NetApp® all-flash arrays with ONTAP® software form the backbone of the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) offering. Lalit Patil, chief technology officer for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, described how NetApp accelerates SAP’s business. “NetApp helps us because the easier it is to deploy software, the faster it is for the customer to get their business processes activated.” Accelerating deployment, time to market, time to revenue, whatever you call it – it’s about the impact on the top and bottom lines. See more of what Lalit has to say about NetApp and HEC here and here. Who helps SAP run SAP? NetApp. On the premises and in the cloud.

NetApp is proud to have been a sponsor for the Intelligent Enterprise and Business Technology Platform tracks. If you missed NetApp at SAPPHIRE NOW, you can still “see us” here – just as though we actually met at SAPPHIRE - and take advantage of our 1:1 VIP meetings through July 31.

No matter where you are in your SAP journey, no other vendor is as well equipped to meet you in your present, and help you to get to your future, as NetApp.