Understand your path to SAP S/4HANA (updated)

By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. This means you will need to upgrade your SAP systems. But what are your best upgrade options?

There are three basic SAP cloud migration paths. Companies that want to start off slowly can undergo a traditional SAP cloud migration, moving their assets into the cloud without moving to SAP HANA at all. This allows you to show ROI quickly from running in the cloud while minimizing initial disruption and lets you wait for the major SAP HANA and S/4HANA upgrade for a later date.

Another option is migrating to Suite on HANA — with SAP ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 7 running on a HANA database. This gives you all the incremental benefits of HANA, such as faster performance and compatibility with newer applications and will get you close to a full S/4HANA landscape.

However, most companies will benefit from moving directly to S/4HANA. In most cases, a complete upgrade and migration will be less disruptive and less costly than several smaller upgrades and the new functionality will provide a major competitive advantage right away.

Deployment options for SAP S/4HANA

• Cloud - Public Cloud - SAP offers a pure Public Cloud option—Software-as-as-Service (SaaS)—such as SAP Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure, to name a few, which hosts and manages the entire HANA infrastructure, including the quarterly upgrades. This option can also be managed through the public cloud provider, internally or by an SAP partner like Approyo. 
• Cloud - Private Cloud - Under a private cloud setup, the HANA infrastructure operates on a private cloud exclusive for the use of an organization. This scenario can be managed internally or by a third-party and can be hosted internally or externally. It works best for companies looking for on-demand scalability, complete management control, and security prioritization for their IT assets while combining both on-premise and cloud solutions. 
• Hybrid Cloud - The Hybrid Cloud option involves using a cloud provider as either IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).  With either option, the organization must manage a portion of their on-premise assets and associated services while the rest of the portions are managed by the Cloud service provider.
• On-premise - On-premise deployment is hosting SAP S/4HANA in your own data center, which isn’t mandated by SAP’s upgrade cycle. Under this scenario, the HANA appliances are hosted on partners/customers’ existing data centers. 

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

3 Major Business Benefits of SAP HANA

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory data platform that supports both transactions and analytics on diverse data, a key requirement for applications supporting a modern, real-time digital business. In today’s digital economy, businesses cannot take action on stale insights, thus a true in-memory data platform should support real-time processing for transactions and analytics for all of a company’s data. This is a key differentiator of the SAP HANA platform against other traditional database vendors. Here are the top three benefits of deploying SAP HANA according to SAP.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Managing Data of All Sizes
Does it always make sense to have all data in-memory?  Realistically, this is not necessary. SAP HANA provides an innovative way to manage hot and warm data storage in an optimal way to strike the right balance between price and performance.

SAP HANA Dynamic Data Tiering provides multistore table partitions which easily allow a single table to span across memory and disk.  This greatly simplifies access to hot and warm data in consuming applications and greatly reduces the administrative effort to manage large data volumes. This provides for much lower total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of hardware needed, lower administration costs, and more efficient IT operations overall.

Foundation for a Modern Data Platform and the Intelligent Enterprise
SAP HANA is a modern multi-tenant in-memory platform to build next-generation Big Data, IoT, translytical, and advanced analytics applications. SAP HANA allows advanced analytics using a single data platform.  How is this done?

SAP HANA natively provides capabilities for machine learning, spatial processing, graph, streaming analytics, time series, text analytics/search, and cognitive services all within the same platform.  Applications on SAP HANA can provide real-time actionable insights from a wide-variety of data types.

Combining these innovative technologies with SAP HANA’s advanced application development, modeling and custom algorithm support inside the database layer, more business logic can be executed close to the data.   Specifically, SAP HANA’s support technology like stored procedures, business functions, core data services, rules framework, calculation views, and the application function library provide developers with a way to easily model complex data-intensive operations as close to the data as possible.  Most competitive solutions require that you copy the data between core data storage and other technology stacks to perform these advanced analytics on the data.

View the full post on www.approyo.com

BOHH Labs and Approyo Announce OEM Agreement for Enhanced Security within SAP HANA Environment

BOHH Labs, the leading provider of seamless and secure access to data, today announces an OEM agreement with Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider. The agreement brings a bundled solution that offers SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA Cloud environments with a secure method to easily enable access to all enterprise systems for increased business flexibility and productivity.

The market demand to adopt Cloud deployments is rapidly gaining momentum, but security, performance disruption and accessibility are still challenging progression. Under the agreement, Approyo will integrate BOHH’s capabilities to enable better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA and mitigate these setbacks. This will offer their customers better security for their data and business flow to leverage the benefits of SAP HANA and convert real-time analytics into business decisions.

Approyo has been providing solutions powered by SAP HANA®, such as the latest version of SAP S/4HANA®, in the cloud for the last three years. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, helping companies move to SAP HANA quickly and benefit immediately with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration.

BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

“Approyo is proud to offer this new security solution to our customer base,” said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. “I believe our industry leading SAP Cloud Solutions and BOHH Labs’ award-winning solution recognized in the SAP+Google Cloud Intelligent App Challenge, makes for a unique combination for SAP customers looking to move to the Cloud.”

“This agreement is a great step for everyone involved – joining together with Approyo, we can now help SAP customers increase their business flow through a secure Cloud that allows them access to all of their sensitive documents using one quick search of all their finding requirements,” said Simon Bain, CEO of BOHH Labs. “By partnering with Approyo, we can address customer demands and focus our capabilities on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the Cloud.”

The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the Cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data.

IT Simplification with the SAP HANA Platform

Today’s companies are looking to cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data technologies to make everything smarter, faster, and simpler for their customers. But for IT, these technologies can be disruptive – upending the status quo, requiring change, and complicating operations on the ground. The SAP HANA platform can help you simplify IT so that you can realize more value from your investments and achieve the breakthroughs that drive success.

Simpler Data Footprint
Highly compressed and requiring no aggregation, SAP HANA removes the need for data duplication and reorganization. And because data is managed in active memory, insight can be delivered at extraordinary speeds.

Simpler data processing and operations
No indexing. No extract-transform-load (ETL) transformations. For IT, life is easier. For users, access is faster.

Simpler landscape
SAP HANA consolidates online transaction processing (OLTP), online analytical processing (OLAP), text analysis, and spatial data functionality in a single platform. This simplifies your environment and drives down your total cost of ownership.

Simpler code and application development
SAP HANA and Approyo simplify development as well:

• Rapid development tools
• Concise data model
• Extensive use of views
• No aggregates or multidimensional cubes
• Libraries of pre-configured analytical functions
• Embedded application server with user interface services

Simpler user experience
SAP HANA delivers data faster – with real-time responsiveness for instant insight and fast action. And applications built with the SAP Fiori® user experience are role based and persona centric across lines of business and devices.

Approyo named one of 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers by Insights Success Magazine

Approyo is honored to announce that it has been selected among The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers by Insights Success Magazine.

Insights Success is a platform that focuses distinctively on emerging as well as leading companies, their confrontational style of doing business and way of delivering effective and collaborative solutions to strengthen market share. This magazine talks about leaders and orators from the world of technology, which includes CEO’s, CIO’s, VP’s, Managers and other professionals who had set a benchmark in the revolution of the industry.

“Starting their own business, while knowing all the difficulties, obstacles and competition one will have to face, is the greatest challenge the brave entrepreneurs of today are accepting wholeheartedly. One such outstanding influential entrepreneur, who’s running his venture, while influencing the world is Chris Carter of Approyo.” Archana Ghule, Editor-in-Chief of Insights Success.

“We are honored to be named to this great list. We want to be the most customer-centric SAP HANA business in the world. This means our team is focused on our customers and making sure that they are achieving their goals,” said Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo.

Approyo has been providing SAP HANA solutions such as SAP S/4HANA 1610 in the cloud for the last three years. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, allowing clients to move SAP HANA quickly and benefit immediately without the massive upfront cost structure typically seen with those bare metal solutions.

About Insights Success
Insights Success is a forum where top leaders and executives talk and share about their experiences, views, and mantra for success which will help the young and dynamic bloodline of professionals to learn, cater and deliver business needs for customers in order to become futuristic market leaders. FAST is widely recognized as a leader of both on premise and cloud-based software solutions for the insurance industry. Insights Success has listed FAST as one of The 10 Fastest Growing Financial Solution Provider Companies based on its performance, its innovative solutions and its contribution in the changing scenario of financial market.

Approyo Expands Team Adding Vice President of Marketing

Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider, announced today that Kyle Ackerman has joined the company to the position of Vice President of Marketing. In this newly created position, Kyle will lead all marketing efforts for Approyo.

 “I’m thrilled to join the Approyo team in this role and help share Approyo story to the world,” Kyle said. “I’ve worked with Approyo for several years and I am excited about the positive momentum and culture developing at Approyo.”

“Approyo is ready to make the next leap in our business and we need to get our story out there to more businesses” said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. “I believe Kyle can help Approyo get to the next level. He has worked with us as a consultant for several years and it is a pleasure to bring his marketing expertise to the team.”

In addition to over 10 years of marketing experience, Kyle has extensive experience within the technology industry. Most recently, Kyle, worked as a freelance Marketing Consultant, helping several small businesses achieve success through digital marketing. Additionally, Kyle has worked for several technologies based companies focusing on Cloud Computing, Hosting, SAP, Microsoft and Software Licensing.

Approyo has been providing SAP HANA solutions such as SAP S/4HANA 1610 in the cloud for the last three years. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, allowing clients to move SAP HANA quickly and benefit immediately without the massive upfront cost structure typically seen with those bare metal solutions.

View the full press release