SAP is the backbone of your enterprise, touching nearly every facet of your business. It is truly a mission-critical technology that requires solid performance and high availability to deliver the level of service the business requires. Failure of this critical system introduces tremendous business risk, both to the successful execution of internal processes and to the service level agreements to which your customers hold you accountable.

The Challenge

With SAP playing such a mission critical role in the organization, most SAP customers are seeking to maximize the value of their investment. Virtually all SAP customers are in the midst of expensive, time consuming module upgrades, new module rollouts, and migrations to NetWeaver, often at the same time. Customers looking to streamline costs are consolidating to global instances and planning moves from physical to virtualized landscapes in parallel to new functionality rollouts and migrations.

Inherent in all these initiatives, although they’re often incremental and well planned, is a large amount of risk; risk that the SAP system will fail to meet needs of the business, risk that rollouts will go poorly and suffer rollbacks, risk that they will spend too much for too little return. NetWeaver on its own presents many unique challenges to SAP customers, as it entails a move to a Services Oriented Architecture, where the performance of each “service” with affect the performance of all the others.

Inaccurate sizing, incomplete information about the performance characteristics of SAP modules, and unforeseen requirements for additional capital expenditures in infrastructure all conspire to slow down SAP deployments. Even test environments like Mercury LoadRunner fail to predict the performance and capacity needs of SAP deployments in a production environment.

What IT lacks when planning these large-scale IT investments is Insight. While most seasoned SAP customers are very familiar with the technical aspects of SAP software, it is difficult to align those technical capabilities with the needs of the business, plan budget appropriately to ensure sustained and timely support for key initiatives, and ensure that the SAP landscape will perform adequately in growth or expansion scenarios.

Potential issues with SAP landscapes include:

• Problems migrating from R/3 to NetWeaver
• Module performance problems
• Infrastructure bottlenecks
• Too much or too little infrastructure to support business demand
• Unplanned outages

• Understanding the cost and performance implications of end-user activity and SAP overhead
• Identifying opportunities for consolidating or virtualizing SAP landscapes

Predictive IT Management Capabilities

The unique Predictive IT Management capabilities from HyPerformix enable SAP customers to manage their budgets and guarantee the service levels of their SAP landscape. SAP collects a large amount of measured data about every transaction. HyPerformix’ unique capabilities can quickly and accurately use this information to predict future performance and capacity requirements of SAP.  By turning technical information about current and future performance, workload and service level requirements into business insights, HyPerformix provides exceptional, accurate, forward looking decision support for SAP customers and administrators.

HyPerformix provides unique modeling and simulation capabilities with step-by-step guides, extensive pre-configured integrations SAP R/3 and NetWeaver data sources, a methodology and best practices to derive the business insights required to make informed business decisions about the SAP landscape. HyPerformix integrates seamlessly with HP (Mercury) LoadRunner to accurately extrapolate production environment performance and capacity from test. HyPerformix also includes specific support for modeling and deriving business insights from SOA environments, features that are unique in the market.

Examples of insights facilitated by HyPerformix include:

• Current utilization and performance forecast to determine how your current SAP applications and modules are currently operating
• Accurate, dependable predictions of required infrastructure for SAP module rollouts or migrations
• “Time to live” for SAP modules and capital expenditures required to extend it

• Carrying costs of current SAP overcapacity
• Budget and performance implications of a move from R/3 to NetWeaver, and best landscape configurations to support the migration
• Ability of current SAP landscape to handle increased business volumes, and critical point at which additional investment is required to support the growth
• IT budget (cap-ex and op-ex) required for SAP to support new business initiatives or seasonal peaks in volume
• Consolidation and virtualization candidates in current SAP landscape
• Specific configuration changes to improve performance and capacity from current SAP landscape and cut costs
• The performance and budget impact of moving SAP applications from the LoadRunner test environment to the production environment

These are a small sample of the business insights that Predictive IT Management from HyPerformix provides specifically for SAP customers. HyPerformix can extrapolate business insights from virtually any current or planned SAP landscape or module, bringing risk under control and facilitating informed business decisions.

The HyPerformix solution for SAP Software includes:

• IT investment decision support for consolidation, migration, provisioning, readiness, and continuity of SAP landscapes
• The full breadth of the HyPerformix Predictive IT Management Suite, optimized for SAP software
• Full integration out of the box with SAP R/3 and NetWeaver and Mercury LoadRunner
• A QuickStart program to quickly derive business value and insight from your SAP initiatives
• Full training and pre-packaged consulting engagements to enable your team to accurately and efficiently size SAP initiatives

The Value

The HyPerformix Predictive IT Management solution for SAP Software, a unique offering in the market, provides exceptional value to SAP customers.

Business insight from technical SAP operations facilitates:

• Successful transitions from R/3 to NetWeaver architectures with reduced rollbacks
• The best performing infrastructure possible with full view into IT budget requirements
• Reduced firefighting of production SAP landscapes by 10% or more
• Smoother rollout of new modules, upgrades or migrations
• Reduced risk of failed service delivery or rollbacks
• Guaranteed service levels even during consolidations or traffic spikes
• 17% or more savings on infrastructure cost
• Reduction of SAP load testing costs by 40% or more

Informed business decisions in IT mean that SAP initiatives can be planned in advance, designed to meet the service level requirements of the business, and predictably budgeted.  Insight from Predictive IT Management allows SAP customers to reduce the risk of consolidating landscapes, module rollouts and migrations, and to identify the appropriate budget to support their SAP plans. HyPerformix is the leading provider of Predictive IT Management in the market today and the only vendor to provide extensive SAP support.

"The scope of McKesson's operations generates tremendous transaction volumes. The costs and implications of scaling our SAP implementations to the size of our business are key concerns for us. We need to stay ahead of performance and capacity issues. We expect HyPerformix will allow us to be predictive about our infrastructure costs, and to plan far more effectively."  Steve Dunne, Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture for McKesson Corporation