SUSE: Empowering SAP Customers in the Hybrid-Cloud Era

I am writing after a short but exciting trip to  South America, where I had the chance to visit SUSE customers and partners of different sizes – from small regional businesses to global multinational companies operating across countries. 

What they had in common, was – they were  SAP users in different stages of their digital transformation journey. Some are evaluating their first steps towards public or private cloud adoption, RISE with SAP, the Business Technology Platform, and eventually how to combine all of them. Others have already made the move and shared their experiences, lessons learned, and next steps they are considering to take the most out of the platform powering their businesses. 

What stood out to me was that, independent of their company size or the levels of cloud adoption, all of them had in their plans, at least for some transitional years, some need for keeping some systems on-premises in a truly hybrid cloud deployment. All are adapting their architecture for this hybrid context. This pretty much aligns with what I have seen in North America and Europe.

The reasons for this are many – like handling confidential information and compliance; or high latency with the cloud due to some of their operations residing in remote locations; cost reduction; optimizing ingress/egress traffic; and even disaster recovery reasons, increasing resiliency of their applications in case of downtime on their cloud provider.

On top of all that, all of them are also working around the clock to prepare for the upcoming end of support for their production applications like SAP ECC, PI/PO, MII/ME, IdM, and others – which will is scheduled for 2027 (or can be extended to  2030 with an extra fee).

During my conversations, the question that always came up was: How can SUSE help them to succeed in a hybrid environment?

SUSE’s SAP Solutions Were Created for a Hybrid World

The answer for this question is very simple: SUSE’s portifolio for SAP applications were designed to be platform agnostic, meaning that it provides the same experience and functionalities wherever customers runs it, providing them flexibility to plan and move workloads between different platforms, thereby streamlining operations. 

SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP applications is the best Linux platform to run SAP applications. It is available in a single package that is fully integrated with your platform of choice, whether it is bare metal, virtualized, hyperscalers, or even as part of the reference architecture of RISE with SAP.  

It comes out-of-the-box with SAP clustering capabilities, automated deployment and tuning that identifies your selected platform and abstract the complexity for you. 

It also includes monitoring and configuration compliance provided by the more than 110 best-practices checks included on the Trento console for the various platforms. Trento when combined with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager becomes a powerful tool that gives a single view of these different systems. This helps SAP Basis and Linux admin teams work together on the most important SAP operations in the world. 

The recently announced SUSE Rancher for SAP applications follow the same path, and includes tooling to faster deploy and monitor your Kubernetes platform and containerized applications; the SUSE Application Collection including innumerous “on-click-install” applications following high security standards regarding CVE fixes and Software Supply Chain Security; and best practices tailored for your SAP cloud native needs, like how to deploy the Edge Integration Cell and operate the SAP Integration Suite in the hybrid cloud. 

SAP Your Way

At SUSE, “choice” is one of our core values and we apply it in everything we do. Our SAP solutions portfolios and services are here to provide you the choices you need, where you need, independent of the end destination you set for your SAP digital transformation.