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4.5 min to readSAP Services

Plan your roadmap for SAP on Azure

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Pierre-Francis GrilletGlobal Director, SAP Business Development
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Taking advantage of advisory services for SAP is a great starting point to turn your digital business vision into executable strategies with exceptional business outcomes while leveraging public cloud platforms. Providing professional guidance on how to create an SAP on public cloud strategy that is built to last and perform is one of our main areas of expertise. We have been acknowledged as a new Global System Integrator (GSI) for SAP on Azure, an exclusive partnership offered by Microsoft for companies that help their SAP customers migrate their system landscapes on Azure. Only industry-leading service providers have been bestowed with this honor – which may leave you wondering how we won the favor of Microsoft in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

There’s no doubt that it originates from our expertise in not only SAP, but also in Azure. After all, SoftwareOne, through its SAP Services Practice, has supported more than 250 customers in migrating their SAP production landscapes from on-Premise to the Public Cloud since 2013. In addition, SoftwareOne offer customers SAP Commercial & Licensing Advisory Services to optimize SAP-related licensing costs. Let’s take a closer look at how we help optimize SAP environments on Azure.

How our SAP technology experts provide advice for you

When you sign up for our SAP Advisory Services, you’ll receive recommendations to tailor your SAP deployment that are supporting both your business and IT strategies. During our assessment, we’ll identify opportunities to reduce infrastructure spend, accelerate innovation, increase spend and consumption flexibility, improve system performance, optimize the management of the SAP landscape, and ensure you are set up to take advantage of benefits the Azure cloud offers SAP customers today.

Because our customers have varying needs, we offer a multitude of structured assessments to understand the current state of the business and compare it to their future goals, incorporating opportunities for optimization. Whether you need some quick advice or help with planning your entire journey of SAP to Azure we are here to assist you.

We’ll tailor each advisory project to your needs so we can build relevant recommendations into a roadmap that supports your journey to the cloud. You’ll be able to see your options going forward at a glance, and even get a high-level timetable with the associated project and consumption costs required to accomplish major milestones.

Microsoft Azure Accelerator Program

As an alternative to our highly tailored Advisory services, Microsoft is offering SAP customers who are contemplating a move to the Azure, an accelerated and structured path, deliverable through SoftwareOne. The Microsoft Azure Accelerator Program is a funded assessment program that drives workload discovery and provides customers with recommendations to migrate or deploy SAP ECC or S/4HANA on Azure. As one of Microsoft’s Global System Integrator Partners, we regularly advise customers on their SAP journey to Azure. As part of the Azure Accelerator Program, the SAP Premium Assessment addresses several key questions:

  • How can I reduce my overall cost of running my IT systems, incl. Hardware and Data Centers, move to an OPEX model, and leverage cloud economics?
  • How can I ensure a smooth transition of my SAP workloads to Azure with minimal system impact and/or downtime?
  • How can IT cater to the increasing pace of business innovation? How can we accelerate and optimize the provisioning of new SAP instances on Azure?
  • How can I leverage architecture best practices supported by Microsoft and SAP to optimize performance while keeping spend in check? How can I produce a roadmap to transition to S/4HANA?
  • How can I find a reliable and trusted advisor to support my SAP to Azure Cloud move?

Working collaboratively through the above questions, our customers receive a Technical Assessment of their landscape, a Transformation Roadmap, and specific recommendations from SoftwareOne which are based on many years of experience working on both SAP and Azure technologies.

Once you’ve signed on with SoftwareOne, we’ll quickly begin our assessment, pointing out multiple opportunities for savings along the way. Since we understand time is money, we strive to have our assessment finished within 1-3 working weeks depending on the size and complexity of your IT and business environment. The Assessment supports your planning, execution, and budgeting process for your migration of SAP to Azure.

What makes SoftwareOne different

At SoftwareOne, we offer best-in-class advisory services for Azure and SAP. All of our SAP consultants are both certified for SAP Technologies and Microsoft Azure. With an average tenure of 15 years, our team is confident that we can help you move your SAP to Azure. Overall, our goal is to take the complexity out of your transition, allowing you to move your workloads to Azure with ease.

To stay current, we ask our consultants to participate in at least two external certifications across various technologies every year and gamify and glorify the experience. We encourage our consultants to continuously build their expertise to be able to solve the toughest technology problems which might also explain that we have a 99% retention rate across our team.

The value of this continuously expanding expertise cannot be understated. We have experts that are multiskilled in both SAP and Azure, as well as in other relevant cloud technologies. This allows us to do all the heavy lifting to help host SAP in Azure and to immediately identify and resolve problems that would be challenging for a partner with experience solely in SAP or Azure.

A growing number of high-profile customers trust us with the operation, maintenance, and management of their SAP platform. Our SAP Platform Managed Service offers customers a white-glove approach. We supply dedicated SAP Services Success Managers, continuously optimize cloud consumption, and offer technical recommendations to balance performance with costs so you obtain the highest value from the Azure platform.

Throughout all of our Customer engagements, we continuously leverage our learnings and in-depth experience to enhance our world-class SAP Monitoring solution to help maximize our customers’ SAP system up-time and performance, streamline business process monitoring, and enhance compliance and risk management.

Final thoughts

With SoftwareOne’s SAP and Azure expertise, we provide you with an extensive ability to support the planning, migration, management, and optimization of SAP on Azure.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a small emerging business or a large enterprise, or if you have no previous experience with SAP and Azure. We are here to support you.

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We are ready to lend you a hand with SAP

Wherever you are in your SAP journey, SoftwareOne has solved many of the problems you may face. Tell us about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.

We are ready to lend you a hand with SAP

Wherever you are in your SAP journey, SoftwareOne has solved many of the problems you may face. Tell us about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.

Author

A man in a blue shirt is posing for a photo.

Pierre-Francis Grillet
Global Director, SAP Business Development

SAP Services