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Gregor Stöckler, CEOOrganizations are mostly concerned if their investment in SAP systems is worth the business value of the data that these systems store. As a result, they need to employ solutions that help unlock the maximum potential of this data. Also, SAP systems and the data within should be flexible enough to seamlessly integrate with other systems during mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as well as when an enterprise divests its business. The success of these M&A transactions largely depends on tools that enterprises use to transition systems as well as to ensure reporting continuity and smooth integration. A system carve-out can make or break a deal; hence, it is critical to plan it thoroughly by taking into consideration the buyer’s and seller’s infrastructure, legacy systems, business requirements, and more importantly, the sensitive nature of the data. “This is where we come in as one of the three companies globally that provide the technology and services to rearrange organizations’ SAP systems and data in accordance with changing business needs,” states Stöckler. “And we support our clients right until their job is entirely done. With a dedicated, hands-on mentality, we are personally involved in clients’ projects the way we would want to have it for our own company.”
DATAVARD’s competence lies both in merging as well as disintegrating SAP systems. The company uses proven technologies, expert know-how, and specialized toolsets to effectively restructure systems while ensuring that business-critical information remains protected. For every carve-out, DATAVARD guarantees selective extraction of data that is of utmost relevance to the acquirer and safeguards the rest, thus driving maximum value at minimum risk.
Data Tiering: Healthier and Leaner SAP Database
In addition to offering the flexibility for mergers and acquisitions, DATAVARD helps organizations benefit from their existing SAP data. The volume of this data is a common concern in the IT landscape as it drives up the operational costs and slows down a system’s performance. Eventually, the user experience (UX), which is mostly associated with speed today, gets affected negatively. A viable solution to this problem is to rid the systems of all the data that delivers no business value. “Studies suggest that more than 80 percent of the data in SAP systems is used by nobody, and organizations mostly pay for something that fetches them no returns. We shrink their databases by removing the unyielding data clutter, thus increasing the percentage of data that is of active value; call it a health check or detox,” points Stöckler. Organizations leverage DATAVARD’s patented HeatMap technology to track user behavior for data in their SAP systems, which enables them to categorize high and low-value data and significantly reduce their operational expenditure. With HeatMap, organizations can tap into the potential of usage statistics and other metrics developed by DATAVARD to optimize their SAP system operations.
DATAVARD retains only high-value or hot data in the online database while the cold or rarely used data is archived for future reporting and updates. “A lean and clean SAP database not only lowers costs but also boosts the overall system performance.
And there is your business benefit straightaway,” highlights Tim White, MD and VP Professional Services Americas, DATAVARD. “The magnitude of costs saved can be gauged by the fact that every terabyte (TB) of data in a productive SAP system generally costs about tenfold the amount of data sipping in. Hence, when you compress the size of your production environment by 1 TB, your storage requirement goes down by a factor of 10, which is huge.”
DATAVARD’s data management suite—OutBoard—is capable of achieving up to 90 percent compression rate and can be easily deployed. As an add-on inside the SAP system, OutBoard segregates analytical and transactional data, documents it according to operational relevance, and stores the data automatically in various databases. This enables companies to reduce the database volume, improve the performance of their SAP systems, and simultaneously save operating costs. It can be linked to every SAP-certified database management system, SAP IQ, as well as cloud-based storage systems.
Archive Data with OutBoard
Owing to OutBoard, DATAVARD has earned a place in Gartner’s ‘Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement’ in 2015. “What Mercedes is to the automobile industry, OutBoard is to the SAP landscape. Several industrial giants have integrated their SAP systems with OutBoard that runs in the background to provide valuable business insights,” remarks Stöckler.
While implementing its solution, DATAVARD works in close cooperation with clients and maintains open communication with them. The company first creates a proof of concept and provides frontline consulting to help clients precisely understand how the solution functions. “The prime objective is to build a long-lasting partnership with clients and empower them to optimally operate the OutBoard suite within their IT departments,” mentions White. DATAVARD’s offerings, including OutBoard and HeatMap among others, have a proven track record of successfully reducing costs and improving performance for clients across various industries. They have registered immediate enhancement in their production environments. One of these clients, a publicly listed German life sciences company, managed to dramatically shorten a job that ran for 11 hours to just five minutes with DATAVARD’s help. Similarly, in the case of Eni, an Italian multinational oil and gas company, DATAVARD reduced the database size by 78 percent.
DATAVARD’s project for Kion, a leading manufacturer of forklift trucks and warehouse technology in Europe, further substantiates OutBoard’s effectiveness in reducing the system size. With the acquisition of numerous new companies and development of applications in recent years, Kion’s SAP BW had grown from 6 to 11 TB in size, which resulted in longer query times. The truck manufacturer needed an archiving solution that was future-proof, flexible, and easy to implement as well as operate; OutBoard proved to be a natural fit. DATAVARD helped the client archive 120 of the largest BW objects, thus achieving a compression rate of 91 percent. Consequently, Kion reported a performance improvement of 25 percent.
Managed Services
Besides improving the speed and performance of SAP systems, DATAVARD’s OutBoard frees up organizations’ resources to focus on innovation that deliversa competitive advantage to businesses. “In an increasingly complex IT landscape, organizations struggle to deal with new technologies and hence, fail to focus on innovation. On the one hand, enterprises are marching toward simplification of the SAP landscape, and on the other, they are making purchase decisions for single, isolated use cases. The proliferation of these small, single-purpose solutions further complicates the overall IT operations,” adds White. As a result, DATAVARD’s ability to manage organizations’ SAP-related operational tasks and allow developers to carry out strategic projects is a huge advantage; the company offers managed services to help clients solve problems beyond their existing capacity. Depending on their unique needs and circumstances, clients outsource either the highly repetitive, time-consuming tasks or the operation of their innovation teams to DATAVARD.
Optimizing SAP Systems for HANA Migration
DATAVARD invests a significant amount of time and resources in R&D to continually enhance its solutions and better address clients’ needs. The company’s proprietary software has been progressively fine-tuned over the years; with every new version of SAP, a new component is added to the software to make it compatible. DATAVARD offers a complete portfolio for SAP HANA migration. Transition to S/4HANA and BW/4HANA starts with cleansing an enterprise system and archiving low-value data, through choosing a suitable, individual migration path that fits the clients and its employees’ needs and smoothly transferring high-value data to a fast in-memory platform. “At the same time, we are backward compatible too. We can seamlessly function with technologies from the past including R2 and mainframe application systems,” mentions White.
The efficacy of DATAVARD’s future-ready and broadly compatible solutions can be illustrated with the company’s project for the Czech car manufacturer, Skoda Auto. DATAVARD’s OutBoard DataTiering compressed Skoda’s database system by 87 percent, improved the query performance by 20 percent, and also comprehensively prepared the automobile manufacture for HANA migration.
By continuing its R&D efforts, DATAVARD plans to expand its customer base in the U.S., which is one of the most important markets for the company in terms of growth. “We believe that the adoption rate for the latest advanced technologies is significantly higher in the U.S. than in Europe. As a result, we look forward to partnering with organizations that are leading edge,” says Stöckler. With DATAVARD as a friend and caretaker, organizations uncover pain points in their SAP systems before they become a problem, reduce costs and save time by keeping data growth under control, align data strategies with the ever-changing business landscape, and leverage new technologies to bring innovation.
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