Microsoft Azure comes of age as SAP platform – now and in the future

BNW Consulting comes of age this year – we’ll celebrate 21 years as a specialist SAP consulting business.

Over that time we’ve watched the technology industry mature and our clients’ needs expand. But our focus has never wavered – to treat every customer project as if it were our own.

That means we want the best solution, on time and on – or even under – budget, and without any nasty surprises.

When we started out, pretty much every customer had their systems on premise, not any longer. Rapid maturity of mission critical strength and trusted clouds – particularly Microsoft Azure now it’s available in Australia – means that organisations of all sizes and in all sectors are transitioning their SAP systems across to Azure.

For us the fact that Microsoft and SAP have a working partnership that goes back years and is still strong is really critical. We know that as clients start to embrace SAP HANA, Azure is ready and that the two companies will continue to work together with the best interests of their mutual clients at heart.

This is so important to our clients. We’ve a strong track record in migrations, and in the last

18 months we’ve moved eight or nine companies into Azure.

I won’t deny there is complexity here – success demands more than lift and shift.

SAP is the beating heart of 90 per cent of organisations – it sends information out through arteries and veins to various parts of business and often to an array of different software applications.

If the heart stops pumping your business is in trouble. If the systems aren’t tightly integrated and the underlying computing infrastructure highly resilient everything quickly grinds to a halt.

When you get it right though, and transition successfully to the cloud, that beating SAP heart sounds good.

Since it was first introduced, cloud computing has been adopted for its promise of cost efficiencies – the ability to pay for computing through opex rather than capex. Companies also want the elasticity, the scalability, the agility.

At the same time companies get the benefits of everything going on behind the scenes. So when Microsoft invests in R&D, new technologies, power efficiency – Azure users benefit. It works on really effective integration with third party software – Azure users benefit. Microsoft invests in market leading security technologies and practices – again Azure users benefit.

Microsoft is also geared up to support SAP users migrating to HANA.

Right now SQL Server is now considered by the leading RDBMS platform in the world, so the economics of running SAP on the Microsoft solution are compelling and there’s more innovation than ever on SQL Server- much of it specifically geared towards Azure functionality.

At some stage every SAP user is going to take a look at HANA. HANA is supported in Azure with multiple products so a move to the cloud today means you’re already prepared for tomorrow.

We have several customers who will go live this year with S/4HANA or some other HANA solution on the Azure platform.

The depth of solutions in Azure means we and our clients can cherrypick to create exactly what we need. Economics just wouldn’t allow that if companies still ran their own data centres.

It’s what one of our clients calls “evergreening”; Microsoft continually invests in and improves Azure and businesses have access to an the latest computing environment technology that can be rolled out anywhere in the world to meet any business need. Our customers can tap in to the billions of dollars Microsoft spends on R&D for Azure for a dollars per hour, something that they could not or would not do themselves. 

It just makes sense.

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