Two worlds, one beginning – accessing the global opportunities of tomorrow

by Marius Vermeulen

04 May 2021

Migration to the cloud

Topics in this article

When the rover Perseverance recently landed on Mars, it was the spectacular culmination of an 11-year international collaboration.

The rover, now working to give us new insights into the red planet, was etched with the motto, ‘Two worlds, one beginning’, alluding to the dust swirling around the sun billions of years ago that formed both Earth and Mars. For many of us working in fast-moving enterprises, constantly planning and reacting to change, focusing on a single project for over a decade may seem unimaginable. But if your organization relies on SAP as the backbone of the business, you will be looking ahead. Whether your vision is to explore the benefits of an immediate migration to the cloud, take advantage of application enhancement for SAP HANA, or anticipate the end of SAP ECC platform mainstream support in 2027 – establishing a partnership to help you navigate this journey is key.

Sunrise shinning on the helicopter

When two worlds collaborate

It’s not just the scientists at NASA who are reaping the rewards of a long, successful collaborative relationship. Microsoft and SAP have worked together for more than two decades so that businesses can confidently drive innovation in the cloud with a clear roadmap. Their investment in collaboration enables businesses to run and deploy SAP business applications on a secure, scalable and proven cloud platform.

In a digital world, performance matters. Organizations are more reliant than ever on their front and back-end applications for both flawless customer experience and quality decision making. Given SAP's footprint across the IT infrastructure of some 404,000 businesses across 180 countries1, it’s fair to say that when SAP applications aren’t performing, business results suffer.

NTT has all the necessary SAP and Azure certifications to underpin this 20-year collaboration – recognizing our work to develop both the advanced skill set needed to support an efficient SAP cloud migration and a Managed Service for centralized, cross-platform monitoring of SAP applications.2 As a global company, we understand the importance of supporting the roughly 77% of all global transactions that touch SAP software.3

Four proven steps – one giant performance leap for Microsoft Azure Cloud for SAP

Migration to the cloud to modernize your SAP architecture can feel like reaching for another planet. With such significant changes to SAP support on the horizon, many organizations see this as the perfect opportunity to take control of the strategic performance of their SAP estate. To make this transformation work for our clients, we have developed a unique, four-step process and delivery framework to enable you to make the most of Microsoft Azure Cloud. We understand that this journey needs to be based on your organizational goals and infrastructure with proven IT and governance consulting to maximize the transformation:

  1. SAP Assessment – Providing deep insights into your SAP infrastructure
  2. SAP Cloud optimization – Introducing flexibility and agility into your SAP estate
  3. Journey to SAP for HANA – Providing the most efficient path for transition
  4. SAP Platform Analytics – Enabling you to generate actionable intelligence

Organizations exploring the benefits of Azure for their SAP applications are taking a proactive step – not only to escape rising maintenance costs and the agility challenges of exploding data sets, but also creating a platform to power their business that never slows it down.

Where to start

1 What Companies Are Using SAP? (nbs-us.com)

2 NTT and SAP https://hello.global.ntt/en-us/about-us/our-partners/ntt-and-sap

3 See footnote 1

Drawing on our experience in helping our clients avoid common delays and potential pitfalls, the NTT SAP Assessment tool helps you understand your SAP system and guide your decision on how to plan relocating to the cloud or explore whether to consider a Managed Service approach. It’s taking this critical first step that provides organizations with a practical, prioritized transformation road map for global opportunities. 

Visit our SAP website to find out more.

Marius Vermeulen

Marius Vermeulen

Senior Director: GTM Practice Solutions