Mainline Information Systems
The SAP HANA Platform Experts

Today, more than 425,000 customers in 180 plus countries use SAP software applications. Contrary to the common belief that SAP is for big businesses, today, over 80 percent of its customers are small and medium enterprises. At the same time, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SAP applica¬tions. Now, there is a significant transition that awaits a major por¬tion of these customers. By 2025, all of SAP’s systems will be built to run on only one database—HANA. This will bring a convergence of systems from a multi-database strategy into a single in-memory da¬tabase, supported by new landscapes, such as BW, S/4 and C/4 which will be enabled with new capabilities and higher performance. Mean¬ing, SAP customers who are not already on SAP HANA need to select an infrastructure, develop a migration plan, perform the migration, test, quality assurance, and move their business-critical systems into production by 2025.

Choosing an infrastructure that provides maximum value and highest cost benefit is very important for the user. In today’s SAP landscape, this essentially boils down to choosing between IBM Power Systems and x86 systems, and cloud vs. on-premise, or a hybrid combination of both private and public cloud.

Headquartered in Tallahassee, FL, Mainline Information Systems helps customers overcome these migration challenges by providing architecture choice, sizing, high availability configuration, Business Continuity/DR plan, and security. “SAP customers with relatively small database requirements and few users can utilize an infrastructure that is different from the needs of larger organizations with multiple terabytes of data, BW and S/4 landscapes,” says John McCarthy, President and CEO of Mainline Information Systems. For the last nine years, the company has invested heavily in analytics, security, AI, cloud, and hybrid cloud solutions to help its customers as they extend their applications to modern platforms, such as SAP HANA and container technology. “Mainline is a solution provider that helps businesses on their SAP HANA journey,” McCarthy adds.

Demystifying the Scope of Difficulty

According to McCarthy, the migration to HANA presents a two-fold challenge for a majority of SAP users.

“Most CIOs speak of two critical issues in the SAP space: Uptime and Performance,” McCarthy says. They are especially challenged when their organization has adopted a “cloud first” strategy. When they have the opportunity to retire legacy systems or migrate to new systems, such as SAP HANA, they look at cloud deployments first. But cloud brings another layer of concerns: Will the user experience be satisfactory? Is the system performing? Is it as secure as possible? Are any business disruptions minimized? Will the applications remain tightly coupled with the data? If users start moving pieces to the cloud, and if they still depend on some data that is still on-premise or an external cloud, how can they be assured that performance would stay intact? Choosing to run SAP HANA in the public cloud must be carefully reviewed as the success or failure of that decision will be based on a thorough analysis.

Mainline’s approach with SAP HANA solutions is to work closely with the customer to remove such concerns. The company documents the customer environment, strategic direction for infrastructure, and key operational requirements, including RTO, RPO, security, performance, growth expectations, skills, and corporate cloud strategy. Based on these factors, Mainline works with its customers to design alternative architectures for the SAP HANA implementations and a recommended total solution, based on capacity for growth, performance outlook, HA/DR, costs, and an implementation timeline.

 
The Innovation Center will also showcase IBM’s latest POWER9 technology for Linux, AIX & iOS, as well as the IBM z14 mainframe.

Aside from technology platforms, Mainline invests in skills such as its cybersecurity practice that helps enterprises with any aspect of data protection, including security assessment, planning, solution design, and implementation. “We also partner with specialized firms who focus on SAP security, and our expertise in backup solutions has helped our SAP customers protect their data,” says Gordon.

One such customer is PACCAR Inc., one of the largest designers and manufacturers of light-, medium-, and heavy-duty commercial vehicles in the world. For their upcoming growth opportunities, PACCAR needed a server environment with lightning-fast processors and the ability to scale and dynamically allocate resources. As part of their due diligence, they examined several options, including a study comparing the performance of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems versus on the Intel-based x86 server.

“PACCAR had an aggressive growth plan with several global projects slated for the coming year. We anticipated scaling from about 2TB of data per system to 5-10TB per system, and a server environment that can support that capacity,” says Maqsood Ahmed, Technical Fellow, PACCAR.

Mainline proposed IBM Power System E980, the only solution in its class that can support PACCAR’s growth. The company helped PACCAR migrate to IBM Power System E980 with zero downtime, and the solution provided best-in-class response time, rapid scalability, and dynamic allocation of resources. The implementation yielded substantial cost savings with fewer software licenses needed. PACCAR found themselves with IBM Power System E980 running with 6-10x more resources and the ability to add more systems for better performance at a lower cost, ultimately creating even deeper trust in the Mainline partnership.

Making a Difference

A major differentiating factor for Mainline is their collaborative work environment. “An interesting statistic is that the average tenure at Mainline is 9.2 years, and 50 percent of our employees have an actual tenure of 10 or more years. Pretty significant when you contrast that with the average tenure in the IT industry of just 1.8 years,” informs Marie Ashway, Mainline Director of Marketing.

Mainline’s long tenure, coupled with its focus on customer success, directly results in long-term relationships that they appreciate and enjoy with their clients. “We enjoy long term relationships with our clients because we consistently deliver the skills and solutions that solve their IT challenges,” says Jeff Dobbelaere, Mainline VP Technical Sales and Services. “We continue to invest in a 2:1 ratio of technical resources to sales resources, which our clients depend upon.”

Going beyond its successful partnerships with customers, Mainline also has a sustained history of strong community support. “The Kearney Center is a perfect example of Mainline’s investment in our community,” says McCarthy. Rick Kearney, Mainline Chairman and Founder, offered the upfront funding of a new homeless shelter, which officially opened on April 2015. The new shelter is a facility for comprehensive emergency services.

Into a Bright Future

McCarthy is confident about the chartered path of Mainline. “Going forward, we expect to continue forming new partnerships with manufacturers, developers, and service providers. We acquired RTP Technologies earlier in the year, bringing us north of $900M in annual revenue and giving us entry into the NY Metropolitan geography,”states McCarthy. Mainline already enjoys a thriving partnership with Red Hat, which is expected to evolve with IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat. The company will also continue to develop partnerships with services partners where they need additional skills. “As we have for more than 30 years, Mainline will continue to explore M&A opportunities to grow our customer base and invest in growing markets,” concludes McCarthy.