Can your SAP operations keep up with business demands?

SAP operations teams are increasingly required to support new initiatives within their businesses, while keeping the lights on throughout the existing landscape. In a world where time is a scarce resource, this can be a challenging balancing act. Too often teams are far closer to losing their balance than they would like (or than the business would like to hear).

Top questions to answer before starting 2022

Quite obviously, the adoption of automation and AIOps for day to day operations significantly improves this situation. However, there’s another aspect to consider as we go into 2022; delivering innovation through strategic initiatives. In 2022, we need to focus on these two questions:

1. How do we improve our ability to deliver on new and emerging requirements? 
2. How do we increase quality, speed and efficiency when delivering on strategic business innovations? 

Read on to discover approaches that address these challenges that allow for growth in 2022.

Focus on scaling with consistency

Before you can deliver business innovations you need confidence that you’re adding to your landscape in a way that is consistent, secure and won’t cause issues later. Adding 10 or 100 servers as part of a project might sound reasonable. But let’s not forget that they will need to be secured, hardened and included in the monthly maintenance windows for patching.

A future proof AIOps landscape management platform

Having an AIOps landscape management platform for 2022 that takes care of this topic is key. So no matter what systems you add, you know that your company's best practices for management are being automatically applied. 

Working example:

Imagine you are adding 20 SuSE systems along with 60 Windows systems. 

In 2022, it’s not enough to apply all the checks and balances for the above scenario manually. You will need all the basic hardening, patching, access control and other standards applied instantly, and out of the box to your new assets. 

If you use Avantra for your AIOps landscape management, you can group systems by type with ease. You can also auto deploy checks, automations and notifications based on these dynamic groups. No manual effort required.

This level of automation during deployment means that the effort required to successfully deliver business requirements is reduced. That’s also less risk and increased service quality. Not something to be sniffed at in 2022 where trust, security and reliability are going to become ever more important.

Be nimble, deploy quick

“Service quality and speed improvement that will turn heads.”

A long time ago, at the beginning of my career in SAP, I was a technical SAP consultant delivering large scale, on site projects for customers. Over the years, there was a very common risk highlighted as part of nearly each and every project that involved new infrastructure or changes to existing networks. That risk was related to how long it would take to get those changes implemented and the impact it would have on the overall project timeline. While the world has changed since then, this topic is still one of the most common issues that needs careful monitoring during any project.

As SAP operations professionals, we’re expected to deliver an increasing quality of service. Both as part of the day to day operations, and as strategic business projects. Increased quality means decreased downtime, and meeting or exceeding SLAs on changes. However, we need the right platforms and processes that set us up to succeed.

So, going back to the earlier working example (20 SuSE systems and 60 Windows systems), by the time you get the VMs provisioned, there is still a lot of manual effort required. Someone has to patch, install monitoring agents and get ready to hand over to the project team. 

In the latest Avantra release, 21.11, a brand new feature has been launched which automates a lot of this manual effort, including:

• System self registration within your SAP operations management environment
• SAP system auto discovery
• Integration with landscape deployment automation tools e.g. Red Hat Ansible

Avantra delivers on two sets of efficiencies here. Firstly, go from single vanilla system deployment to completely managed in seconds, instead of hours. And, secondly, deploy at scale for all systems in just a few minutes. The massive parallelization of activities that Avantra provides means you could patch, install monitoring agents and be ready to handover those 20 SuSe systems and 60 Windows systems within minutes. 

That’s a service quality and speed improvement that will turn heads within the business.

Learning to say “Yes”

“Operations teams must transform into an enabling function that frequently says “Yes” and relishes the challenge associated with supporting business innovation.”

In 2022, there’s going to be an increased move towards best in class, domain specific technology. While this is absolutely the right approach, it can leave your operations team struggling. These sprawling ecosystems need monitoring, management and integration. 

Your department can’t dictate the applications, versions and interconnectivity types that you support or allow. You’re expected to adapt to this ever changing picture. And adapt you must, or better yet, stay one step ahead. Operations teams have to transform themselves into the enabling function that frequently says “Yes” and relishes the challenge associated with supporting business innovation - rather than always saying “No”.

Being able to say “Yes”, requires flexible landscape management technology that’s capable of adapting with you. The landscape management platform you chose today must cope with the demands of tomorrow. Including demands that do not exist yet. If a technology enables your teams to experiment, develop and innovate on the platform itself, you’ll be able to respond to unique business requirements - not just what the vendor says you need.

With Avantra, the ‘in platform’ development environment for operations teams is designed for you to say “Yes.” It’s built for the creation and mass deployment of customer specific checks, automation and notification logic which is configurable for nearly every possible scenario.

Do you need an AIOps platform for 2022?

SAP operations is changing at a rate we have never seen. During this transformative time, the business expects you to keep up, while increasing system stability, improving service quality and delivery times, and even innovating new ways to deliver for the business. 

You will only succeed if you take the steps to implement an operations foundation. One that focuses on accelerating your in house abilities. Look for an AIOps platform that scales your team’s ability to:

• Dramatically increase the level of SAP automation
• Bring a completely flexible and robust approach that supports next generation requirements
• Deliver consistently and quickly on strategic innovation projects at a business level.

If you want to know more about Avantra and how the platform can support your SAP operations teams to power innovation and deliver a secure and reliable business experience while meeting growing demands, see additional information about Avantra Enterprise benefits.