This presentation will do a deep dive into customer success story Elevance Renewable Sciences’ recent SAP Production migration to Azure.

Join Protera Technologies’ CTO, Patrick Osterhaus, as he discusses how project success was achieved by using Protera’s FlexBridge the SAP certified migration acceleration platform to minimize downtime and lower overall project costs.

Transcription

Introduction

Kristin: Good afternoon and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, Moving SAP to Azure, featuring Protera customer success story Elevance. I’m Kristin Taner, Global Marketing Strategist for Protera Technologies, and I’ll be hosting today’s webinar. We appreciate all of you taking time out of your very busy schedules to attend today’s educational session. And we hope to demonstrate the path for SAP users to Azure through our customer success story. We will be starting the webinar shortly, but first a few housekeeping notes.

Only our presenter’s phones are live. Your microphones have been muted by default to block any background noise. Our presenters will be answering questions at the conclusion of the webinar. If you have a question at that time, please type it into the Q&A function on your webinar sidebar. If we don’t get to your questions during the presentation, I or another member of the Protera team will be sure to follow up with you directly. And lastly, this webinar will be recorded and a link will be made available to all attendees. Now, I would like to introduce today’s presenter, Patrick Osterhaus, Chief Technology Officer for Protera Technologies.

Patrick  Osterhaus, Chief Technology Officer for Protera

Patrick: Thank you, Kristin, for the introduction. Indeed that is me. I’m Chief Technology Officer, and we’ll get started right here into our content and our agenda for today’s webinar. So we’ll talk a little bit about Protera, about who we are as a company and our experiences. And what we’re going to talk to you today, what makes us a special position to talk about this content today, which is running SAP solutions on Azure, and especially, we’re gonna look at a case study here with one of our customers, Elevance, as Kristin mentioned. So we’re gonna take a look at what it takes to run SAP on Azure. And we’re gonna look at a good method to move your compute from on-premise environments or another hosting solution into the Azure platform with our product, FlexBridge, which we can use for our migrations to ease that transition and make it no downtime involved.

So a little bit about Protera foremost. We were founded in 1998 and we are a worldwide company with our headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. You can see our locations. We’re located here, as I say, in the midwest United States. We have offices in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and with that, we provide 24 by 7 follow the sun support with our AppCare platform, which we’ll be talking about here in the next few slides. Our mission here is to focus around ITO services and providing a platform, so not just the services and providing support, but providing a full platform of how we will provide the most leading-edge innovative solutions in the market, which includes the Azure file, which we’re gonna speak to in very much detail on the characteristics and what we can take advantage of to provide new solutions for SAP. And also how we take those same benefits of the Azure cloud and extend those to other areas of your organization. So, we’ll talk more about those ideas in the slide deck.

Also, it’s important for us to note their certifications. We’ve been aligned with SAP in their new technologies for many, many years. And we have a global certification just most recently awarded to us in the last month. And that is around five areas, as you can see here, around hosting, mobile operations, cloud, SAP HANA, and AMS services, so focusing on that SAP solution whole and managing it from a technical perspective. So we take those certifications very, very seriously. And we invest heavily in keeping current. And with that global certification, that’s extended around the world, we just recently got that, as I mentioned, a month ago. So it’s something that we continue to invest heavily in staying on top of our SAP technology and our partners are taking us. So speaking of partners, we have a long-standing relationship here with Microsoft focusing around the Azure platform. So that provides us to see that the latest technologies that are offered and certified for SAP and bring those to our customer solutions.

And I also mention we have a tight integration with SUSE and where their technologies are providing some very leading edge solutions and improvements, especially around the HANA space. And we have separate webinars focused around that for HA and DR in the cloud, and so certainly looking forward to providing and sharing that information in the future with the audience. So that the offerings we’ll talk about this platform, how we deliver this is the solutions called AppCare. And as you’ll see in the next slides in more detail, it’s not just a solution based around providing AMS and those SAP applications services. It’s for the full stack, and so this includes helpdesk, the monitoring, syncing up HA and DR for your environments, and also the processing many problems, troubleshooting that. All this is backed up in SLA in a monthly subscription. We’ll talk a little more about the details in that in the next few slides here. So lastly, the key differentiators for us is being this ITO AppCare services delivery platform as our major focus. And with that, we can provide very tight integration with the Azure cloud in our services for SAP. You’ll see a little more detail on this out.

The AppCare Platform

So in the middle tree, you can see this AppCare platform in some detail, the many components of this. Within the AppCare service, a customer can take advantage of all these areas. So you have one company that you work with and that was gonna provide essentially the full stack. And we’re gonna see this a little more in detail so I won’t go through each one of those layers here.

But the key point is that we can integrate the SAP solution and take the best advantages of the infrastructure in the platform services that Azure provides. And we can extend those capabilities of the Azure cloud then to the SAP solutions suite, which you can see on the right side. So this includes the non-SAP solutions, so ECC ERP. Anything that’s running with a traditional database, we certainly support that and we support it in the cloud as well as we have a lot of new customers adopting that HANA migration, the in-memory technology as well as S/4 that’s fully supported on Azure and, again, a lot of companies that are bracing that, especially around our technology for the ease of migration to cloud into HANA with FlexBridge. We’ll talk about that.

We also extend our support and our expertise to these other areas, so Microsoft Dynamics and integrating tools, Active Directory, the technology that makes credential management and authentication a lot easier with a platform. We will fully integrate that into the solution into Azure even with on-premise systems that the customers have today. And we’ll extend any of the collaborative software, Office 365, SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Office groups. All these new technologies are fully supported and provided as our services for our customers.

So, again, this idea around this AppCare platform, it’s not just people and it’s not just setting up management services where you have Basis people watching the systems. Our focus around the platform is around the people in focusing on certification and making sure that they’re up to date while training. We have a unique training platform we call University of Protera, which make sure we standardize on the best practices of SAP, how to manage systems, how to set up the new technologies. So we ensure that we’re doing the very best practices that SAP provides. But also it’s around the processes, so the automation of the tools and how we do backups in HA. We automate and ensure that we’re following the best recommendations from SAP and our partners with Microsoft to help systems integration.

And lastly, we’re focused on the tools and technology. And this word gets into this slide of taking advantage of the cloud and all it can provide for us, and in these attributes, the flexibility, scalability, agility, security, and efficiency. These are all inherent in the Azure cloud. So we can…as you see, we mentioned the choice of applications. There’s many SAP solutions that are fully supported in Azure. So you can choose your existing on-premise systems, what can be moved and fully supported in Azure, and the quick deployment options, which we’ll talk about around migration, some choice you have with going to HANA or S/4 or even moving a traditional database SAP-based system over to Azure, what are your options are. So we’ll go more into the flexibility part.

And the key parts that when we think of cloud is this next piece around scalability and the quick option for you to quickly scale a system or down. So if you have a seasonal business, where you have peak workloads that are 2X, for example, higher than your average throughout the rest of the year, you can quickly scale add additional compute and make those systems larger size and that have to pay throughout the rest of the year for this additional capacity. You only pay when you need it. So it’s an inherent advantage of the cloud and it’s built into Azure and fully certified by SAP. So, obviously, we wanna take advantage of that for our customers and provide a quick and easy platform for us to take advantage of that.

Rapid deployment that comes in with images that you can quickly build any kind of SAP operating system. So, if it’s Linux-based, if it’s SUSE, or if it’s Windows Server, you can quickly deploy this with an image, you can quickly spin up test systems in a matter of minutes, and lastly, the security and efficiency. Usually, those don’t go together but being that you can build templates quickly, build the systems with data security built into the design and take advantage of all the security that’s natively built into the Azure cloud, you can make security very efficiently provisioned and supported and monitored in the future. So we take advantage of these, all these features that are inherent in the Azure cloud and provide that to our SAP customers.

Protera’s Technological Capabilities

So talk a little bit about how we got to the place we’re at today. As I mentioned, we were found in 1998. And since that time, we’ve been doing full implementations, migrations, spot consulting, and the most challenging kinds of work to support our SAP customers. So it gives us a very good view of the full lifecycle of an SAP customer. So for companies that are coming in, brand new to SAP, they’re brand new to S/4, we’re gonna help them right from the beginning with a design, looking at the architecture, looking at sizing, making sure the systems are not undersized but also not oversized. And we have a little more leeway today now with cloud where we can…as I mentioned, if a system is gonna be five years from now be 2X or 3X the size of demand, we can size that. So we can grow as the company needs it so they’re not overpaying for research they do not need.

And we highly encourage here, as I mentioned, a proof of concept. This is a great, great place to try out Azure. You can copy a system over there using our FlexBridge tool set and quickly spin up a copy of a system. You have an ECC with a traditional database. So you can move that over to HANA Azure very, very easily and kick the tires on in-memory computing for your ERP system, so very easy way that we can test out a system, a customer system into the cloud in the Azure on HANA. And as I mentioned, we’ve been doing the implementations for many, many years. We got our experiences on some of the largest implementations of SAP in multi-year very complicated requirements. So we’re used to seeing some really hard requirements, not only from a basis but also from the implementation side and in migration side. So we’re used to seeing this. And I say the run capabilities in the operations after go-live. This is actually a key part of our certification by SAP in making sure that we run systems efficiently, but also securely and making sure we’re following all the best practices by SAP, so very important parts that we have to maintain and run.

Success Story: Elevance SAP ECC Production on Azure

So I’ll introduce our topic here today. Our case study is around Elevance Renewable Sciences. And as I had mentioned, they came to us in 2013 looking for a service provider for hosting a technical management of their SAP ECC landscape. And three years later, after managing for three years, we looked at possible innovative ways that we could further reduce their costs, but also provide a better solution around the elasticity of the cloud and taken advantage of the nature of the Azure cloud for security and to be able to quickly provision systems.

So, three years ago, we started with them or four years ago now. And last year, we look to do the migration. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today and how that was accomplished. You can see their solution. They have ERP, our solution manager. They’re based on Windows with SQL server. And most recently, we’ll talk about their new deployment and how that moved over to Azure.

So, previously, when we started working with Elevance, we provide our AppCare platform as you can see here the details, which I’ll go to in the next few slides of what Elevance took advantage of. And the way that those was connected was the Elevance’s corporate network was connected to the AppCare platform by VPN, which was also the way they connected to their SAP systems, so their ECC landscape dev quality production, as well as the shared solution manager, which isn’t represented here, but that’s part of the AppCare solution. That is part of the technical stack that they took advantage of. And we’ll go through a little more detail what this on the left side what this is and comprises of.

Managed SAP Landscape Service

So in that left side, in that bubble, it’s actually abstracted. And we can look at this, again, this is the left side, left square here. The Protera AppCare platform provides with an SLA. So we guarantee performance, and our services level is guaranteed by contract. And there’s penalties if we do not reach those high standards. But this is applicable for all system types, production, non-production for again for the SLAs and they’re focus around steady-state environments, yet we are there also for those implementation and to help with those tough challenges getting SAP implemented. So, again, SLAs, guaranteed availability and then the services that I mentioned before about the plain, the design all built into the service, so looking at sizing, looking at capacity planning, looking at all the interfaces and any advanced areas around HA and DR to be able to set those up. And all these are again certified by SAP.

On the right side, we wanna focus that we highly recommend a functional partner or the customer during these implementations that we would tightly partner with these partners to provide a full and end solution on implementation. Now, it’s a little different if the customer is already live and know implementation is going on, our services may not require the functional AMS part, but typically, we would have that either done by that or not. Typically, we always have the customer as part of the solution, but we may or may not need that functional partner if it’s steady-state.

So, key part functional we always recommend for implementation. Steady-state may not be needed during those months when a project is not going on. And then for our areas that we focus on is this technical AMS. So you can see here, this is taking care of the operating system in the database. That’s part of our responsibilities, which you can consider the SAP Basis layer. That’s taking care of all the patches of SAP as well as the subsequent areas, operating system database, doing backups, doing all the planning around capacity, making sure all the performance of systems is up to standards. And then also providing that with a helpdesk, which that’s how the work can be scheduled as well as any communications with the customer which happens. And I’ll talk a little bit about that in the next slide. And lastly, the infrastructure, which you’ll see here broken up by layers of the Azure cloud in the areas that we take full responsibility over.

SAP Application Managed Service

Just like if you want to think of it from a standpoint of Azure and the technical stack, so you have the infrastructure as a service, which is the infrastructure provided by the Azure cloud. You can think of that as almost through that the blue section on the bottom and halfway up through the yellow. So you can see the data center, the network, all the computing assets of the cloud. So all these abstraction you could call it the software-defined network. So instead of having physical routers and physical firewalls, we would fully manage that through the Azure console. So Protera takes full advantage, we take full responsibility of the Azure cloud and to fully manage that. So the customer does not have to worry about getting trained, being certified in that platform to be able to take advantage of all their services and those advantages. So, essentially, all the way up to the application, that very top level, we will take full responsibility of and do this. We need help from the customer, on the business, so the configuration when an upgrade occurs to make sure that the system is properly tested and that the users are trained, but throughout the full stack, Protera takes full responsibility over that and that’s providing that SLA, that monthly service.

Service Center Workflow

As I mentioned, it’s a 24/7 helpdesk focused around these SAP services. So, we would interact with the customer either through the phone or we can also go through the portal to automatically create tickets. And this is an example of the customer creating a ticket. We also have, and by and large…I don’t have the metric, but I would say it’s over 90%. Most of our tickets are actually generated by us through proactive services through, the monitoring, through us keeping an eye on those systems through all of our tools sets that we’ve implemented over the years to make sure those systems are running at the very highest standards that we set.

So, there’s many ways that you can engage us, like I said, most of our products or services catch any problems before they actually happen. So most of these touch points, actually, come from us for us to maintain these systems. It’s important though to note that we’re always here, any questions for requests for new innovations where we use a monthly meeting as a communication where we provide updates on the performance as well as any patching that’s coming up as well as any new service offerings that we provide free in the cloud. So once we provide a new service, for example, around backup, we would implement that to our own standard solution, which you’ll see here for Elevance, which we’ve done. And then we notify their customer that’s sort of being used. So they’re capturing that saving, they’re capturing that innovation a better way to do it automatically.

Managed SAP Landscape Service

And then the key part here talking to this monthly subscription is around the sizing. So, what we like to do is make things very simple for the customer. So you can think of it as a t-shirt sizing. And this is an example you can see for a landscape. You can see this is a development, a test in a production environment and their sized at what we call the SAP’s rating, and the SAP’s rating you’re probably familiar with. But that is a quantitative measure of how powerful that system has to run SAP, and usually, it’s based on the complexity of the jobs of running as well as the users. So, these are example, they’re not the true costing, but just for examples sake, for a monthly fee, you can run a full landscape and you get all the features that have been mentioning here in these past few slides. Sorry, went too far.

Elevance FlexBridge Migration

So let’s go back to our case study here. So as mentioned, 2016, Elevance was hearing about cloud, new capabilities in Microsoft and Azure. And they wanted to see how it would be possible that they could take advantage of these. So when we brought the ideas around FlexBridge and what’s capable with, you know, we were building this over the last two years, we’ve had the capability to build these environments without any outage for the customer. And so to do this, we took that environment that was based in the datacenter with dev quality and production for ECC and we set up a connection through VPN site to site. So, they didn’t even need a dedicated network connection between the data center and Azure to be able to start migrating systems over. So this was done, again, non-obtrusively so that the customer was not affected, but taking large outages to be able to move to a new platform. And it was done very low cost because we have a dedicated network connection to be able to do this. So we’ll see a little more about how we accomplish that next.

Migration and Deployment Service

Now when we talk about migrations and moving to the cloud and moving to HANA, there’s a lot of choices. And if you look at this top path, you could certainly go SAP new deployment, so this would be a new installation. And then you can look at doing data migration, so certainly an option. Some companies are picking this especially for S/4 when you have a new schema. Our recommendation is the lower path and over the past, I’m looking at the old way of doing migrations, that path usually was a lot more complicated and took a lot more time even compared it possibly in the implementation, but it’s certainly a lot more complicated. So the choice is there and the past have been you would look at whatever SAP applications you have. And depending upon the versions and operating system and the database you’re running, you could do a lift and shift, and that certainly could move you into another place. You could move into another data center. You can now move into cloud. The problem with that is that you’re literally just moving exactly what you have the day all the same versions and you’re pushing any upgrade project into the future. So you’re just piling on new projects and adding time and pushing things back. Certainly an option, not what we recommend.

The other choice is you can do a holistic integration. That gives you some more latitude. We saw this a few years ago where companies are moving off the UNIX platform into a less expensive, higher TCO platform with Linux. We certainly saw that where you could move OS/DB even possibly migrate off the database at the same time, yet if you look at doing an SAP upgrade at the same time, you’re looking at, again, multiple projects, multiple outages. So, we certainly were thinking there must be a better way and especially moving to HANA and companies wanting to adopt cloud quickly. There’s gotta be a better method because, for as many company that are gonna do this, we can’t afford to do multiple years for every customer. So what we would propose here is a solution that takes essentially a newer path than this bottom leg. And that’s where we get into Protera FlexBridge.

Running SAP on Azure: One Step HANA Migration

So with this tool set we’ve built, what we can do is we can actually do all these major transformations in one migration, in one outage, one testing cycle. So you can do an OS/DB migration. So for example, you go from a Windows platform or even UNIX with even mainframe, if you could migrate from that operating system, that database and you can move it to Azure and you can go to HANA or another database if you prefer. You can do the SAP upgrade at the same time. So you can upgrade from, believe it or not, even back to 4.6, I believe, and go all the way up to the latest version of HANA. And you can also do conversion at the same time as well as moving to Azure. So we’re talking huge transformation all within one project.

So, to talk about time frames, our one customer we’re doing a migration for now had two one-year projects, one to move to cloud and then one to upgrade SAP after that. We were doing those two one-year projects in six months for that customer. So we’re talking some huge cost savings as well as huge time savings for this idea.

Running SAP on Azure: FlexBridge Assessment Report

So how we start is around an assessment. So if you’re looking to do HANA, you’re looking to do with Azure, you want to start with what were you at today and what’s gonna take to go there. And how we would do this in the past is we would have our experts jump on a plane and spend two weeks at a customer site, interrogating the systems, looking at what’s running, talking to the experts of that environment, and then go back and run a report. And that’d be a good two or three weeks effort and maybe a month of duration end-to-end to be able to…you have the need and have it completed.

So one of the key areas we wanna focus when we built FlexBridge was around having an assessment so we could quickly respond to customer inquiries to see what their as is and how long it’s gonna be the two be to get to cloud and to go to HANA if they wish or if they wanna upgrade SAP. So we built this assessment report with that mind where we could quickly analyze a customer environment and then quickly turnaround report to tell them exactly what’s needed to be done. So what we’ve come up with is an ABAP report that you run in your SAP system. Once you have this after registering it, you can run it in every SAP environment you wish to migrate and then that responds with a text file, which you can see. You’ll have access to all the data that is provided back to us. And I should mention that we only read the system’s tables. We don’t update any and we don’t look at any customer-specific, any NDA kind of data, sales information, org charts, any vendors or suppliers. We don’t look at our customer data. We don’t look at any of that from our customer system. But you’ll see all that because you have the report data. It’s actually emailed back to us. And with that, within a few hours, you’ll have a report that comes back to you with all a bunch of content that tells you what you need to know to migrate over to Azure.

So within this report, you’re gonna have the first few sections, first few pages, which is the executive summary just to high-level summarized cost, migration time, any remediation steps from a high level needs to be done. And then we’re gonna look at that source systems. So, today the report is by each landscape. So we can look at an ERP system for SAP. We could look at a BW system. By landscape, we focus upon what needs to be remediated and then we give you that overview of what the plan is gonna look like and then most importantly, what’s your new landscape is gonna be, how is it sized, what’s the instance details, what’s the operating system and database and SAP versions. You’ll get all of this in this report.

A little more detail around the source. So, we continue to expand this. So today, this has this information. In our new version, which we’re releasing here in the next couple weeks is actually gonna expand this quite a bit more. We’re gonna give a lot more operational details. So it’ll have some functionality that the early watch reports have today, but we’re gonna expand greatly beyond that, so looking at operational capabilities around jobs and optimization of the SAP systems and if there’s any improvements that could be made. So those are coming very shortly, yet today we’re focusing more just on the migration alone and so we’re looking at these key areas of the system, the source systems, what it’s gonna take to migrate and anything that has to be remediated, and those timelines that are gonna be required for it. So it’s really important you look into migrate because you’re looking to migrate and upgrade SAP, what do you have to consider to be able to do that. That’s what this reports for.

Elevance on Azure

So going back now to how we did this for Elevance. So we did this migration by system. So you have the quality, the development quality of production environments all in Azure. And we move those system by system. And again, we did this by site to site. So, the way we do this with the migration capabilities, we can do this even through site to site, you know, dedicated bandwidth could be a slower connection. Obviously, it might affect how long and the migration may occur, but still we can minimize that downtime even for a simple network connection, where how we connect those environments is more rudimentary than a dedicated connection. So again, minimal downtime playing as putting the on-premise systems into Azure and capturing the full benefits from the Azure cloud. So again, now with the AppCare platform with everything that we enabled, we can now bring in the elasticity of the cloud bringing systems up, extending our capabilities where we can build systems very quickly as copies. And another area that we’re looking at for the customer is to extend the DR using Azure site recovery. So that’s another future advantage that we’re looking to take advantage of the Azure platform as a service capability.

And lastly, another area that we captured high value from Azure is around the backups. So we can use the backup capability built into Azure to simplify the off siting and the resiliency of backups where it’s spread over many data centers within the cloud. So, those are key benefits that we’re capturing already as well as taking advantage of the newest hardware, so the performance. The systems are actually running better than they did in the past, not only from the compute but also with storage.

Conclusion

So I encourage you please reach out to us. You can register on our website for this free assessment. Any systems that you’re looking to move to Azure and do an SAP upgrade or even move to HANA, we fully support all those scenarios. So please reach out to us. You get a free assessment and looking forward to working with you on that. So please, reach out.

Before we go into Q&A, I’ll offer up. This is an upcoming webinar. This is going to be I think a week from the day actually. And that is around the Azure series, extending on this Azure service webinar, and that’s a round print-to-digital transformation. So this is the actually hosted by Microsoft. We’re honored to be able to take part in that. And I encourage everyone to be able to join us for that webinar. So with that, we can open our Q&A. Thank you, Kristin.

Q & A

Kristin: Great. Yeah, thank you, Patrick. That was a really great webinar. So, if anybody has any questions right now, you can type that into the Q&A function and we’ll be answering those shortly.

How do we move from on-premise to cloud with Flexbridge?

Patrick: Yes, let’s look like a couple coming in. So we get two in here right now. So the first point I’m seeing here is around how do we do this migration, some details around the FlexBridge and how we move it over from an on-premise environment and how’s that going to cloud. So really the answer on this question depends around what the customer is trying to accomplish. So if we’re looking to do essentially a copy of the system with no changes major versions, changes of SAP, we would recommend the replication. And we can actually set that up many ways where we copy that system without any downtime where we can flip the system over very quickly. So, there’s many various ways we can do that through just a system copy or actually replicating the system and hold. We would always recommend that we try to capture in any of these migrations, in these moves to Azure any value for updating the operating system so we get the best experiences around what’s now available in SUSE, especially for DR and for HA, especially around HANA. So we would highly encourage companies to look at that as well as capturing the benefit of those operating systems and the improvements there when they’re moving to cloud.

So the full capability with FlexBridge comes around if you’re looking to upgrade SAP, go to cloud, and capture any upgrade version benefits. That’s where we would provide…all these complicated migration capabilities are all put into the tool sets that SAP provides. There’s many tools that we leverage for SAP in this capability. And what we’ve tried to always support is putting as much of that processing into uptime so we can minimize that downtime period. We fully anticipate that’s gonna be one of the biggest areas that companies are gonna have with. That’s one of our first questions when a company is looking to migrate is, “What’s gonna be our downtime window?” So that’s basically how it’s through replication. It gets a little more complicated for upgrading the SAP system also that upgrade is happening while the migration is occurring. And that’s done through SAP tools with the technology they do is a repository switch. So, they keep the system up and they switch it out during that downtime. That’s in summary a high-level approach in how we do FlexBridge. Again, that’s fully dependent and most determined by what the customer wants to do. That’s gonna determine the approach that’s taken.

What does Protera see as the inherent benefits of Azure for running SAP?

Patrick: All right. Another question that’s coming up is around the Azure, you know, the capabilities. What do we see, what does Protera see as the inherent benefits of Azure for running SAP? So it’s a good question. One of the biggest areas I’m really excited about with the Azure platform is around the platform as a service. And the area that they have done a really nice job building out is around Azure site recovery, which is abbreviated ASR. So we can look at…you can even play with this at the customer environment on-premise where you can replicate an environment even bare metal to replicate this into the cloud. And so this is a very nice scenario you can use for many operating systems, not available for all, but it’s available for many operating systems in databases to replicate into Azure. It’s a nice capability to replicate on-premise or another cloud or Azure itself to Azure to set up the DR, so that’s one of the great features I encourage every company to look at.

Is FlexBridge migration only possible for virtual environments?

Patrick: Another question that came in here was around migration and if it’s only possible that the tools that we have with FlexBridge for virtual environments. So it’s a good question. There’s a lot of migration tools out there that only work with the virtualized, especially around VMware. So we built our tool set with the widest net possible, one to capture companies that are running bare metal without any virtualization today. So we do not require that to do a migration to cloud to Azure and around HANA. So you can run this even if you have an older UNIX environment. Obviously, one of the things that when we see older legacy environment, I’ll say, UNIX, a bare-metal, is around how much we can scale up that on-premise environment to run the data push, I’ll say. So, that’s actually been the biggest challenge. We have a customer we’re working with now where they have to procure old hardware, rent it essentially, so we can optimize that downtime as best we can. Certainly, it’s doable, yet there’s some other…I won’t say technical limitations but more logistic challenges that you may have to add more servers or it’s gonna affect your downtime. You may have to take longer downtime. But it’s certainly supported for us to do bare metal and we’re happy to work through those more challenging scenarios with you. We’ve done plenty of them.

What can run on Azure for SAP for today?

All right. And the last question that’s coming in and it’s around more of what can run on Azure for SAP for today? So we have a slide that we usually show in our Azure deck for SAP solutions. So feel free to look that webinar we had a couple weeks ago. There is a note from SAP that mentions all the supported SAP applications, so certainly the operating systems being anything that’s x86 based, so Linux, Windows. Those operating systems are supported by the Azure cloud, especially round SAP. And then the note also details the SAP’s solutions specifically. So you can think of business suite, which is ERP, SRM, SCM, and CRM and solution manager, and then also BI, the BW system. So those are fully supported. Any variants that are off the ERP like GRC and PLM those are also supported. But the note goes into more detail on more. So that’s a good place to start but feel free. It’s not in this deck, but we’re happy to give you the note what it say, if you want help finding that, so a lot of great information. We don’t have it inside hint on here, but I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot new information coming out on the solutions running in Azure at Sapphire. So I think that’s a pretty safe bet.

Kristin: Great.

Patrick: I’m still looking more of those new news.

Kristin: Fantastic. Well, I think that about wraps it up. We really appreciate everyone taking the time again to join the webinar. We’ll have the slides and presentation posted externally to review on everyone’s time. So thanks again, Patrick, for your time. We really appreciate it. And I think that’s about it. Have a great day everyone.