Together: SAP and Microsoft pack a powerful punch
December 2, 2020
December 2, 2020
COVID-19 has turned cloud from an aspiration to an urgent mandate—creating a new inflection point that requires every company to become cloud-first and dramatically accelerate the move to cloud. Cloud first is the foundation required for digital transformation, enabling resilience, trust, sustainability, speed and structural cost reduction.
The world we live in runs on the cloud. From personal computing to enterprise IT, the cloud is everywhere. Cloud isn’t just a technology for technology’s sake – it offers tangible business benefits.
From instantly accessible files and apps whenever you need them (undeniably essential, especially in these pandemic-hit times) to reliable business continuity, the cloud offers robust storage using the best evergreen server hardware. And what about cloud security? Cloud providers deliver security that rivals or surpasses anything even the largest organisations could deliver from their own data centres.
The cloud lets you scale your infrastructure up and down at will, expanding and adapting your business and giving you access to a wide and rapidly evolving world of microservices to help you innovate and support any technological opportunity that rears its head. And you get all of this without any capital investment from your organisation. Microsoft, carbon neutral since 2012, has committed to shifting its data centers to 100% supply of renewable energy by 2025 through power purchase agreements (PPAs). The company recently launched its ambition to be carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to remove all carbon emitted by the company since 1975.
These business-critical benefits are why organizations who run their business on SAP systems are looking to migrate their SAP applications to the cloud. Your crucial SAP apps – the apps that run your business and its day-to-day operations – have long been held back by on-prem hosting.
Do you want new technologies like AI and machine learning? Or easy access to the latest APIs? Need to ramp up your innovation? Well, so far your options have been limited. The cloud is your best choice to open the door to next-generation advances that will keep your business competitive well into the next decade and beyond. For this reason, over the coming three years, almost all SAP customers we work with are setting out on a cloud-first journey to move their SAP apps to the public cloud.
But the big question remains: which cloud service do you choose and what do you want to achieve? Do you want to:
Introducing ‘Together’
If you want many or all of these then one of your best choices: move your SAP instance to Microsoft Azure cloud. Once your SAP landscape runs on Microsoft Azure, a whole spectrum of technological options opens up, giving you the best of both worlds: the power of SAP combined with the technological prowess of Microsoft Azure.
Until now, the choice was binary. You put all your eggs in the SAP basket or ditch your long-serving and trusted SAP apps and go all-in with Microsoft.
Both options are acceptable, but the world does not need to be black or white. By putting these ecosystems “together”, companies can unlock significantly greater value. SAP brings a wide customer install base, S/4 as a digital core (or ERP as the system of record), Line of Business solutions, and the Business Technology Platform as a further evolution of SAP Intelligent Technologies. Meanwhile, Microsoft offers the enterprise-grade infrastructure, databases, and a wide series of productivity and platform technologies including data lakes, AI/ML and IoT.
There is a middle ground where a best combination maximises business value.
Bringing these two giant software and infrastructure systems together takes skill, expertise, knowledge and plenty of tried-and-trusted methodologies and processes.
That’s why Accenture’s Microsoft and SAP Business Groups joined forces to create best of breed combinations in a program called ‘Together’ to help organisations like yours take your SAP apps to Azure.
Of the Accenture customers that have already made the step to the public cloud, 60% have moved to Azure. And many more are planning to make the move soon.
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Let’s dive into the details
In today’s tech-driven world, consumer expectations are higher than ever. To stay one step ahead, you need to offer new capabilities before your competitors. To do this, you need to leverage micro-services, you need to go serverless, you need to be cloud native at hyperscale. Microsoft and SAP play at the centre of that world.
SAP Applications are fundamental system of record for your business. We get that. We also get the potential of new technologies. Machine learning, AI, advanced analytics, machine-to-machine communication – they all offer new way to understand your customers, enhance your supply chain and deliver beautifully customised services that increase sales and loyalty.
Our framework, consisting of cross-platform methodologies and software assets, helps you rapidly and smoothly integrate SAP Systems and Microsoft across a number of areas, what we call ‘accelerators’:
Let’s look at some of these in detail to see the benefits:
A key part of the Together program is our Machine Learning Reference Architecture for machine learning services such as batch scoring, real-time prediction and distributed training with SAP Systems and Azure.
Our Machine Learning Decision Tree helps to identify the right SAP and/or Azure technology based on factors such data source, UI, whether cloud or on-prem and depending on the machine learning models used.
Case study: Supply Chain Intelligent Planner
There are an estimated 7 billion Internet of Things devices in use today. That figure is going to rise exponentially, especially as low-latency 5G connections become standard. But what can IoT do for your business?
It’s likely you’re already using IoT devices in sensors around your manufacturing facilities and supply chain. But there are new ways of using IoT devices that actively save your significant costs.
Case study: Smart Fleet
You might have heard of predictive maintenance and its potential cost savings, but does it often work quite so smoothly in real life? Our Smart Fleet application lets you monitor. Your vehicle fleet in real-time, connecting data into SAP Applications for full analysis.
But it goes much further than that. The logic built into Smart Fleet lets you predict when vehicles and components will fail. You no longer have to wait until a servo motor wears out, taking a vehicle off the road for days or even weeks. You can predict the failure and replace the part before it goes wrong.
Microsoft Teams as the one-stop-shop
When you bring Microsoft and Accenture onboard, you don’t just get first-class Azure expertise. You also get the game-changing opportunity to use business collaboration tool Microsoft Teams as a single point of access. This means that all major tasks can be completed from the comfort of the Microsoft Teams user interface. Deep linking transactions across workplace apps? No problem. Seamless data interchange across multiple apps? Done.
Using Teams in this way makes life easier for your employees and delivers a coherent, frustration-free experience to your customers. It goes far beyond SAP’s standard UIs. It’s a single point of business interaction, across finance, HR, sales, customer service and much more.
Why Accenture?
So why are these organisations choosing Accenture and the Together initiative. Given these challenging times, many clients need to accelerate their cloud-first journey. Accenture and Microsoft have a proven accelerated migration approach with heavy automation, the needed security controls in place, and the experience to make it happen.
Start your journey today
Learn how you can unlock more value by leveraging SAP Systems and Microsoft “together”. Contact us today to start your SAP-Azure migration journey. Visit us on: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/cloud/sap-on-microsoft-azure