How to cover your SAP environment end2end

harbraun — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:31:00 GMT

Hi and thanks very much for reading my blog. I’m Hartmut Braun. In HP’s SAP Alliance team my key focus is on support services for our joint customers. For more than 25 years I’ve had country and worldwide assignments in the IT industry. Since I joined the HP-SAP Alliance as the global SAP escalation manager in 1997, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to work with our clients and SAP AGS to resolve critical issues --- and to learn about being proactive to avoid these issues in the first place. I have worked on many service development projects around IT service and application management, and most recently on our portfolio of support services for SAP environments. But I don’t want to spend more time on me, but rather dive into the subject of this blog, which is all about achieving business SLAs. What I want to share with you over the next view weeks are my thoughts about the value of proactive services and “end2end” support, what is available already today, and where this might be going in the future. I hope this triggers some valuable discussion and generates lively conversations with you about this topic, so please provide your thoughts and opinions to my posts. Let me start with a definition. When we use the term “end2end” in the area of support, we need to make a distinction. This is often used “horizontally”, to refer to coverage for a specific layer, e.g. across multiple HW platforms for server and storage, or for software applications that together support a business process, e.g. SAP ERP and an external Output Management Solution. While this is naturally important and needs to be considered and implemented, it is not enough. Often, it all looks great at first when you have a vendor support contract for your Hardware and Operating System, plus a contract with SAP to support your application stack. And for many day-to-day support situations, this is what you need. On the other hand, we see increasing complexity, not only in the number of components and the variety of vendors, but also in the interdependencies between the HW/OS layer and the DB/App layer of the solution stack. For that reason, I always think “vertically”, about the solution stack, when I speak about “end2end” support. First thing for IT check are the basics of service level management. What is my SLA with the business? Do I have all the underpinning contracts in place, for all elements of the “end2end” solution stack, both horizontally and vertically? This is just the starting point. Next thing to look at: the solution support capabilities of the vendors. Do they just support their product or do they also understand the broader context in which the product is used in your environment. While this sounds easy, it is often overlooked and given lower priority than it should have. Just like with the nature of outages, where technology accounts for only 20%, leaving 80% caused through people and processes, it is the people and the processes in support that make or break your ability to constantly achieve your business SLA’s. Whomever you engage for supporting your SAP environment, you should always check on their collaboration capabilities with SAP and the other vendors in your solution stack. Each of these vendors must have an understanding of how their products are used inside the solution and must have the people and processes to collaboratively prevent and resolve issues. These are my thoughts for today. I hope you find them useful or at least interesting, and look forward to a good discussion. Hartmut

article How to cover your SAP environment end2end in Infrastructure Diaries

How to cover your SAP environment end2end