A Look at SAP HANA Inside Dell IT

As many readers know, Dell is in the midst of an evolution in our business to expand the solutions and services we offer to customers.  This includes increasing Dell’s presence in the data center and enterprise with an expansion of our infrastructure products to include servers, storage and networking, in addition to a focus on IT services and software.  As our business profile is changing, so too must our IT environments as we increasingly interact with new customers in new ways. One example of how we are evolving our IT is with the use of SAP HANA to help us get closer to our customers and better understand and anticipate their needs.

Dell is leveraging the SAP HANA platform for rapid-response, self-service analytics and reporting, ultimately helping us achieve business agility and flexibility.  Our IT team just completed the initial development and quality assurance testing phase of our self-service BI applications on SAP HANA, where users can conduct mission-critical sales pipeline analysis in real-time.  Historically, our business analysts have spent significant time aggregating data before they could gain insight. Through the SAP HANA initiative, we are seeing reduced data management complexity and we’re now achieving a two second response time.

We have architected a model for scaling SAP HANA that we believe will keep pace with the demand of our users in sales operations and services.  To date we’ve been working in a single-node environment, and we will expand with the new architecture to a multi-node environment which we believe will lead to a successful launch.  We will leverage Dell’s recently launched scale-out solutions for our Active Infrastructure platform and rapid deployment services as we conduct these project deployments.

Beyond the work we’re doing internally, we are also committed to helping organizations achieve better, faster and more sustainable business results through joint solutions.  Here’s a look at some of our initiatives underway and recent customer wins:

Dell Solutions for SAP HANA: As the digital universe is expected to be 44 times larger in 2020 than it was in 2009, and 61 percent of executives saying they want more information when making a decision, it’s no wonder that customers want to turn data proliferation into a competitive advantage.  We offer pre-integrated systems, services and reference architectures that speed deployment and reduce time to value for running SAP HANA workloads.  Our work with University of Kentucky, where we have built an education data management solution with SAP HANA as the centerpiece of the solution, demonstrates how we have used SAP HANA to solve our customer’s problems.

Industry Leading Benchmarks and Certifications: Our server team is all about breaking benchmark results, and in May we blogged that the PowerEdge R820 surpassed Cisco, HP and IBM on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark.  At the same time, we were pleased that SAP recognized our services group with a number of new certifications. We take pride in these benchmarks and certifications as they are a good example of the innovative solutions we’re delivering to customers.

Commitment from Dell Services:  In addition to our hardware platforms, Dell offers thousands of enterprise consultants through our services organization.  This provides customers with an enterprise solution delivery model that spans hardware, consulting, implementation, hosting and application management that’s designed to enhance the value of SAP solutions for our customers.  An example of this is the recently launched ZeroIMPACT migration services for SAP solutions that help customers transition from outdated to contemporary IT environments with minimal downtime and reduced risk.

We have a great deal of experience providing our customers with services for their SAP solutions, including Koehler Paper Group, G.I.B., MBDA, OSRAM AG, Scapa Group PLC, and many more, for a wide range of needs from deployment and management of SAP application to business intelligence and SAP HANA.

These are just a few of the exciting solutions and projects we have going on with SAP.  We look forward to sharing more about partnership at SAP TechEd, Oct. 21-25 in Las Vegas.

To learn more about Dell & SAP solutions please visit Dell.com/sap.

About the Author: Andi Karaboutis