As the name suggests one of the key factors of ‘Enterprise Cloud’ is that it’s intended for the enterprise market, in particular the enterprise applications that they use such as SAP, Oracle and JD Edwards amongst others.

Where Cloud Computing overlaps with this sector is ‘Enterprise Cloud Computing‘, and you can follow this topic via RSS here or via our knowledge newsletter.

Our ECC practice is focused in this area and is also based on the book of the same name, with the author one of our contributing experts.

SAP Enterprise Cloud

SAP applications are helpful for aligning IT operations with your business requirements, but they can also create major challenges for your IT staff, slow your systems performance and make it difficult to comply with SLAs.

Integrating SAP applications with other applications (both SAP and non-SAP) can also be a challenge, as can the underlying administration of it too.

There are supporting software options including third-party suppliers external to the SAP suite, who can be used to address these challenges through automation solutions – solutions that can then be built into Enterprise Cloud services delivered from a local managed services provider.

When you consider the workloads associated with big SAP implementations, such as those that are periodic like month-end accounting and then combined also with the ad-hoc flow of user-initiated batch requests, then it’s to see how providing and supporting the capacity required for this can be very challenging for IT organizations. These spikes in demand can cause overruns, delays and therefore ultimately failure to comply with SLAs.

Helping cope with these fluctuating requirements is what the Cloud model is ideal for addressing. Utility-centric providers can act as the “overflow” capacity for these scenarios through offering suitably tailored SaaS plug-ins for your on-premise SAP system.

This is a great example of how Cloud Providers don’t have to run the main application itself but can still add value within, around and beyond it, ideal for being delivered via As-a-Service incremental options.

Our Enterprise Cloud best practices program will explore these service design options in more detail as we go forward, identifying key functional areas of SAP like ‘System Copies’ that are ideal for service provider based solutions.