Today’s SAP announced the certification of IBM’s Power9 E980 servers as part of its Enterprise Cloud infrastructure. IBM’s Power servers offer more memory than their (Intel or AMD based) x86 server competitors, currently stretching to a maximum of 24TB for each HANA 2.0 application.
SAP S4/HANA is the market leading ERP application, deployed as an in-memory application, for which SAP had 13,800 customers at the end of 2019 (see my Figure).
SAP offers ways to deploy S4/HANA. In particular:
- As on-premise software
- From its S4/HANA Cloud
- From its HANA Enterprise Cloud
Of these HANA Enterprise Cloud has the greatest number of features, including SAP applications, a reference architecture designed to help customers move to the cloud at their own pace and the responsibility for running the overall system as a managed service.
Customers also have the choice of a number of enterprise IT suppliers to run S4/HANA for them as a managed service of course, including IBM.
It’s not news that SAP and IBM are working closely together, as keen readers of my posts will know. The difference is that today IBM’s most advanced servers have been certified for use by SAP itself as part of its HANA Enterprise Cloud, rather than just for use on-premise – a much more difficult development.
Essentially ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications are about book-keeping, interactions with suppliers and clients, stock levels, etc.; HANA (introduced in 2011) is a real-time system in which the whole database is held in the memory of a single core of a server processor.
One reason why Dell EMC and HPE have been more successful than IBM in the overall server market in recent years is due to much stronger growth in ‘systems of engagement’ than ‘systems of record’. They have focused most on supporting applications where multiple iterations can be deployed across many processors in a ‘scale-out’ manner. ‘Systems of record’ are arguably more important to an organization than those ‘of engagement’, but their growth has been less – partially due to the more difficult technical challenges of running a large single database in a single processor. This ‘scale-up’ challenge is greatest for the largest applications such as S4/HANA and the biggest customers.
I’m impressed that IBM not only continues to innovate in difficult areas such as AI/cognitive, block chain, transaction processing and analytics, but also strives to make these applications available as cloud offerings, whether from its own or other suppliers’ data centers. Being certified by SAP is just one example of how it’s building its business, which will be accelerated as ‘digital transformation’ (however defined) begins to be applied by large organizations to their internal processes.