How the BOHH Labs and Approyo Partnership Can Accelerate Transitioning to SAP HANA in the Cloud

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly changing, and more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to enhance business agility, efficiency and extract analytics. In fact, technology leader in business applications, SAP, has pegged a deadline of 2025 for when it will terminate support for its ECC6 on-premise solution.

For businesses looking to migrate to more advanced SAP HANA systems in the Cloud, this may seem like a long way off, but the deadline shouldn’t be the only driving force behind your migration strategy. Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions offer businesses a vast array of benefits, as they look to harness the potential of digitization and business transformation.

However, digital transformation is an evolving market and there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For businesses to be successful in their transformation to Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions, there must be collaboration, and Approyo and BOHH Labs have teamed up to offer SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA Cloud environments. Approyo CEO, Chris Carter and BOHH CEO, Simon Bain illustrate below how strategic partnerships can create a best in breed solution that bring success for the end customer.

According to Chris:

"As part of the push to move to the cloud, SAP has developed SAP S/4HANA, which is built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite. It fundamentally redefines how enterprise software creates value across industries with instant insight. SAP S/4HANA also personalizes the user experience on any device and natively connects to Big Data, the Internet of Things, and business and social networks - all in real time.

Like all new things, especially in technology, the updates can be daunting. Approyo can help businesses move SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration. We are one of the only SAP partners in the world that can migrate SAP applications to the cloud, provide ongoing support and provide long term managed services for hosted cloud environments."

Simon Shares:
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"While Approyo specializes in making SAP migrations smooth from an implementation standpoint, we combine with their capabilities to make the migration smooth by enabling better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA. We bring security to the data and the business suite, so customers can get simple access to their complex data. We provide total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, 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 and bring enhanced access flow to data within the system."

Chris adds:

"Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks."

Simon also adds:

"By partnering together, Approyo and BOHH Labs can address customer demands and focus on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the cloud with minimal disruption. 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."

Read the full blog post: www.approyo.com

Migrating your company to the intelligent enterprise

We are entering the era of intelligent mega ­processes, which start by combining the right data sets and converting them into intelligent insights. These insights then trigger automated transactions across the process. Leading companies that are making digital transformation a reality are putting data and intelligence at the center of their future. They are building new capabilities, skills, and technology, and evolving their culture to transform into an 'Intelligent Enterprise' and achieve the aforementioned outcomes. These companies are not only delivering short-term value to shareholders, but are also positioned to thrive and transform their industry.

No company has the appetite to replace their systems, as every company has a very different landscape and a different level of focus based on their business priorities. Everyone has to also see the value. Moving to the Intelligent Enterprise is not just a technical upgrade. The real value comes when companies adopt a customer-first, purpose-driven mindset, leverage innovative approaches such as design thinking and agile methodologies to reimagine business processes and business models.

From SAP and Approyo's experience, there are the top three paths to migrating your company architecture to the intelligent enterprise. These paths have one thing in common - a lean enterprise architecture that is low cost and is data driven and ultimately provides you with the architectural agility in the new economy. The path that is right for you should be based on value and strategic alignment. There is no one way to get there, but early adopters are finding success based on the scenarios below:

REIMAGINE BUSINESS PROCESS: 
Many companies are focused on end-to-end business process transformation (such as supply chain, procurement), landscape simplification, and reduction in customization. The goal is to migrate core ERP processes to S/4HANA +Cloud/ LoB with full transformation in mind. These companies are looking to change the front office, supply chain, and more to truly address customer experience. They are looking to drive the next-generation of processes across the value chain. This requires a fresh greenfield approach, and a detailed review of which standard best practices in S/4HANA meet your business requirements. These companies are ready to move their ERP into private / public cloud environments. While a major effort across business processes, it is paying off with a TCO reduction of 20 - 30% and tremendous business value as next practices are adopted.

REIMAGINE BUSINESS MODEL: 
There are also companies that are looking at business model innovation or M&A and are taking advantage of the ability to have many industry solutions in one box. With industry lines blurring, the ability to take business capabilities from one industry and leverage them for a new business model in another industry is tremendous (for example, bringing retail to telco). This requires a fresh greenfield approach.

START WITH MIGRATING LOBS TO BEST-IN-CLASS CLOUD SOLUTIONS:
While some companies are planning and executing the move to S/4HANA they start in parallel to innovate on the edge. These companies are taking 1 LoB at a time - HR, Procurement, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and are focusing on driving value short-term with ECC + LoB cloud portfolio. Once moved to S/4HANA these companies will fully benefit from the latest innovative solutions end-to-end.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently featured as a guest on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talks about Big Data, Machine Learning, AI and more...

About the episode: 
Big data has officially crashed into the business world, taking competition to new levels.

Can your business benefit from big data without investing in qualified data-science resources – an entire lab and pedigreed experts – to navigate and take advantage of this new business domain, which includes AI and Machine Learning?

Good news!
Packaged application software has lowered the skills barrier to mining the data. Our panel is proof that anyone can successfully use data analytics tools. Hear what they wish they’d known when they began.

Listen on-demand: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/108752/business-analyst-by-day-data-science-hero-by-night

Featured Guests

Christopher Carter
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo, founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more. Additionally, Mr. Carter was fortunate to create the first SAP cloud ever used by an SAP client in 2005, and the first Client SAP HANA Production cloud.

Jason Olson
Jason Olson is an Analytics Specialist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He has spent the last 15 years working in every area of the Business Intelligence field accumulating end-to-end technical and functional expertise. He earned his BBA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater in 2003 and MBA from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh in 2011. Leveraging his business acumen and technical expertise, Jason bridges the gap between technology and the real business needs in a wide range of business functions. His real passion is having a seat at the table with business users to accomplish their goals, demonstrate the art of possible, and enabling those who know their business best to leverage advanced tools and techniques. Jason’s current focus is on Machine Learning and enabling a diverse user base to leverage.

Samantha Wong
Samantha Wong is a Product Manager for Predictive Analytics at SAP. She has been part of the SAP Analytics team for over 4 years, and in her previous role, she supported customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region to drive actionable insights out of their data. With a Bachelor of Commerce degree specialized in Marketing, and experience in Advertising, Banking, and Insurance, Samantha fits the profile of analyst turned citizen data scientist. Connect with her on LinkedIn for interesting articles and commentary on the ever evolving world of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

Where Machine Learning Can Make a Difference for your Business

Machine learning uses sophisticated algorithms to “learn” from massive volumes of Big Data. The more data the algorithms can access, the more they can learn. Real-world machine learning examples are everywhere. Think of personalized product recommendations on Amazon, facial recognition on Facebook, or fastest route suggestions in Google Maps.

Major Benefits of Machine Learning impacting companies today

• Faster decisions - Machine learning algorithms can prioritize and automate decision making. They can also flag opportunities and smart actions that should be taken immediately – so you can achieve the best results.
• Adaptability - Artificial intelligence doesn’t just look at historical data. It can process real-time inputs – so you can adjust on the fly. Think of cars that can automatically stop before rear-ending another vehicle.
• Algorithmic business - An “algorithmic business” uses advanced machine learning algorithms to achieve a high level of automation. Making the shift can pave the way for innovative new business models, products, and services.
• Deeper insights - Machine learning can analyze big, complex, and streaming data, and find insights – including predictive insights – that are beyond human capabilities. It can then trigger actions based on those insights.
• Efficiency - With smart, machine learning-supported business processes, you can dramatically improve efficiency. Plan and forecast accurately, automate tasks, reduce costs, and even eliminate human error.
• Better outcomes - From triggering smart actions based on new opportunities and risks, to accurately predicting the results of a decision before it is made – machine learning can help you drive better business outcomes.

Deploy intelligent applications with embedded state-of-the-art technologies that amplify human qualities.

FINANCE – streamline and improve accuracy of time-intensive, repetitive activities such as assigning incoming payments to open invoices

HUMAN RESORCES (HR) – create efficient hiring processes, enable job matching, and foster an active personalized culture of learning

CUSTOMER SERVICE – gain new insights into customer behavior and improve the customer experience through personalization while eliminating manual processes

MARKETING – address more customers efficiently and personally with the same resources in the same time, and boost revenue, margins, and marketing ROI

PROCUREMENT – use machine learning to enrich your catalog

Machine Learning and SAP Leonardo

Traditionally, organizations have been able to analyze only structured data that resides in databases or business systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software. Because most enterprise data – including images, videos, audio, e-mails, documents, and natural language text – is unstructured, it can be difficult to mine meaningful insights from the vast majority of your data. Fortunately, recent advances in machine learning technologies are making it easier to tap these unstructured data resources.

SAP Leonardo provides advanced machine learning technology that helps applications recognize patterns and correlations in data. The foundation offers instantly consumable services that help you learn from data, extract knowledge, and gain new insights. Without massive computing power or the efforts of data scientists, the foundation helps you add intelligence to your enterprise applications.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Three game-changing technologies impacting Digital Transformation

Business leaders say they need three things from their data systems to help them compete effectively and embrace digital transformation: reliable data to empower their workers, deep insight from all their data, and access to the latest analytics and machine learning techniques to amplify their insights and apply them to their business.

In addition to new business demands, technology advances are creating new strategic opportunities for data management and analytics. The three key technologies that are having the most impact are:

• In-memory computing delivers real-time performance that obviates the need to have separate solutions for transaction processing and analytics. This has the added advantage of removing the need for multiple copies of data and eliminating latency between transaction systems and data warehouses introduced by batch or overnight replication.
• Storage for large data sets is dramatically lower in cost allowing almost unlimited data sets to be created. Coupled with in-memory performance that can handle these massive data sets, business can see insights into their business in real time.
• Cloud computing has reduced the need for huge capital investments and made powerful advanced computing more accessible. New applications can be deployed quickly to capture opportunities without waiting for data centers to be built and systems readied. 

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

Read the full post on www.approyo.com

The Journey to the Intelligent Enterprise with SAP powered by Approyo

In a consumer-driven digital economy, the pace of innovation is relentless. Change has never been this fast, but it will never be this slow again. Companies are beyond the stage of awareness when it comes to digital technologies. They already understand the power of Al, loT, cloud, robotics, and mobile, while others like blockchain and augmented reality are just appearing on the radar.

All of this innovation will be fueled by data, from having the right intelligence to execution. We are entering the era of intelligent mega ­processes, which start by combining the right data sets and converting them into intelligent insights. These insights then trigger automated transactions across the process. Leading companies that are making digital transformation a reality are putting data and intelligence at the center of their future. They are building new capabilities, skills, and technology, and evolving their culture to transform into an 'Intelligent Enterprise' and achieve the aforementioned outcomes. These companies are not only delivering short-term value to shareholders, but are also positioned to thrive and transform their industry.

However, executives are concerned about the path to digital transformation. Early adopters failed to understand their digital ambition and the complexity associated with transformation and are struggling on their journey. Successful companies that are engaged with SAP powered by Approyo are focusing on these five common capabilities:

• Reimagine end-to-end mega-processes - For example, customer experience is not just omni­channel, it's about orchestrating the entire value chain to deliver the best customer experience.
• Enhance enterprise intelligence through smart use of data and Al technologies.
• Run the world economy in real time by connecting industry value chains. For example, leverage end-to-end industry best practices, digital technologies, and SAP HANA to run in real-time
• Manage complexity by simplifying IT's operating model- Focus on clear IT strategy aligned to business priorities and a customer-first mindset.
• Accelerate innovation by moving to the cloud.

Why should your company start the path to digital transformation?

RUN VS. INNOVATE 
Executives struggle to strike a balance between the need to keep running a current profitable business and investing for future innovations. Quite often these two goals conflict, and most executives mistakenly focus only on the former and ignore the latter.

CORPORATE CHOLESTEROL 
The older the company is, the more stuck they are with policies, procedures, layers of management and risk aversion. Their own processes get in the way of change.

INNOVATION CULTURE 
Digital transformation is a journey without a destination. Companies need to build the right talent, skills, and partnerships to capitalize on digital opportunities.

COMPLEX IT INFRASTRUCTURE 
For an average organization with 30+ applications per billion of revenue, 70-80% of the IT budget is spent on keeping the lights on. It is difficult to manage data as a strategic asset and enforce master data governance across a fragmented portfolio. This means considerable value potential is untapped as companies cannot even use 1 % of the available data. Also, executives do not have the necessary visibility into operational and financial performance to manage quick course corrections.

These are complex issues and navigating through them requires change in attitude, mindset, as well as time. Companies that start now will have more time to address these challenges at their own pace.

Given the current speed of change, digital innovations have a short shelf life - today's breakthrough will become a 'me too' in a couple of years. Therefore, it is important to start now, build a foundation and realize value in a step-by-step manner instead of waiting for a proven stack of solutions and proven technologies with which to innovate.

With multiple mature solutions and design thinking led approach to innovation, SAP powered by Approyo is strongly positioned to help companies on their digital transformation journey, so they can become an intelligent enterprise. With the SAP HANA platform and our investments in Al technologies, we will exponentially increase the number of intelligent apps embedded in the Intelligent Suite over the next few years. These new innovations can be consumed at any time through the cloud, but will deliver value much faster if the modern foundation is in place right now.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Unlock business value across all your data sources with SAP Leonardo

In today’s digital economy, anywhere from 60% to 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused. Like many organizations, you may be collecting information on a massive scale. But are you realizing the true power of Big Data?

SAP Leonardo Big Data capabilities are the answer to the challenge of making the most of your Big Data, providing solutions for easily ingesting, storing, processing, and sharing petabytes of information. SAP Leonardo customers gain more powerful business value from their data, with rapid deployment, greater scalability, faster analytical processing, and more powerful sharing across the enterprise than ever before.

In the past, gaining business value from Big Data faced three challenges:

1. Where to keep the data?
2. How to process diverse, unstructured data types?
3. How to unify the enterprise information architecture with Big Data environments?

This resulted in counter-productive enterprise siloes and expensive, time-consuming manual solutions for sharing information. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions offer you a superior approach. The comprehensive lineup of Big Data offerings reduce complexity, overcome silos, and help you get value from the diversity of today’s enterprise data.

Rapidly ingest huge amounts of diverse data
Digitally connected businesses are receiving unprecedented amounts of data across a growing number of sources, at variable speeds and in different formats – from operational logs and social media to Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning touchpoints. To use this data effectively, you need to be able to quickly ingest it. It’s the first, crucial step to applying insights to real-time business decision-making. And it can be one of the most challenging to handle. Until now. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions quickly acquire, store, transform, and share data from every source, including relational databases, enterprise data warehouses, and Hadoop resources. In addition, we provide you with critical tools for data cleansing, quality, and transformation using machine learning, graph computation, and stream processing, giving you the ability to utilize refined data in real time.

Ingestion functions for Big Data processing are handled by an array of SAP solutions across enterprise and Hadoop data. You also have the option to use open source solutions for ingestion to the SAP Distribution for Hadoop software. SAP ingestion solutions let you ingest data to an SAP HANA stack or to Hadoop, depending on analytics requirements.

Store massive datasets from across your enterprise and beyond
The SAP Leonardo Big Data offering delivers massive scale for your growing data, organizing petabytes for ready analysis. This Hadoop-as-a-service computing solution is known as SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services. It provides a scalable, cloud-based Hadoop data store, Spark complement, and a full Big Data platform environment for storage and processing.  Cloud deployment lets you get started rapidly, process much larger volumes of data at a lower price, and scale volumes quickly and easily. The SAP offering uniquely includes operational services to ensure consistent and reliable performance. This is a must for enterprise production environments. In addition to the cloud-only approach, there is also an option for a hybrid model.

Further, in combination with SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services delivers native multi-temperature management for hot or cold data virtualization and schema extension capabilities. And with the ability to federate data from any source, it reduces data movement and speeds response times.

Get comprehensive insights faster with combined analytics
With the SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions, getting business value from combined data is no longer a daunting challenge. Our unified, yet flexible, in-memory architecture simplifies the process of refining and cleaning diverse types of data to enable your business analytics to keep pace with the variety and velocity of business demands. SAP Vora is a distributed computing solution deployed on Apache Hadoop and Spark clusters that provides integration with SAP HANA, so you can quickly and easily run combined analytics across enterprise and Hadoop data.

All SAP Vora operations can be accessed, executed, and extended through SAP HANA. SAP HANA and SAP Vora act as a single system, with joint query optimization and automatic storage decisions. SAP Vora runs on Big Data clusters separate from your Hadoop data. It provides specialized analytical processing for different data formats. The computing engines are designed to run high-performance sophisticated analytics against relational, time series, graph, and JSON data.

Understand every facet of your digital enterprise
The SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions bridge the Big Data value gap by processing diverse data types to make them collectively useful for accelerating your organization’s processes and decision making.

As a result, our customers can thoroughly analyze and understand every aspect of their business, including customer behavior, operational behavior, market behavior, and beyond. They feed that insight into new experiments, forward-thinking innovations, and better customer relationships.The comprehensive approach of SAP Leonardo’s Big Data solutions, combine data ingestion, storage, processing, and sharing to fuel holistic digital transformation. Our data management services encompass diverse data sources, types and endpoints, and accommodate cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments for ultimate customization to your organization’s needs.

Unlock insights and intelligence across your entire enterprise to imagine new business models, develop new supply chains, create new customer interactions, and be outstanding. Only with SAP Leonardo Big Data.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com