The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged solution for SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
Tag Robertson, Alliance and Solution Manager at Lenovo
ORLANDO – At SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW customer event here, Lenovo made several announcements which expanded their relationship with, and around SAP. They announced several joint solutions with global integrators which run on SAP HANA, and new capabilities relating to HANA around data warehousing and memory utilization. They also took advantage of their presence at the first major SAP event since Lenovo announced a partnership with Nutanix last fall to demonstrate SAP-related hyper-converged solutions stemming from that alliance.
While several of the vendor partners who made SAP-related announcements at this event are very long-term collaborators with SAP, Lenovo’s relationship with SAP has been more as a customer, and came by way of IBM.
“The big part of the relationship came with the acquisition of IBM’s PC business in 2005,” said Tag Robertson, Alliance and Solution Manager at Lenovo. “IBM had been a big customer, and a lot of that transitioned to Lenovo, and has been expanded since then. As a customer, Lenovo was an early adopter of HANA. When Lenovo acquired IBM’s System x business and Motorola, that created additional new challenges for Lenovo IT in integrating these together, particularly around supply chain management. To address these. Lenovo and SAP developed a co-innovation project which won the 2016 SAP HANA Innovation award earlier this week, for what is the largest HANA implementation in the Asia-Pacific region, with two 12-node clusters.”
The 2014 System x acquisition also brought development teams which IBM had created to support development with SAP.
“We have two sets of teams at SAP’s offices in Walldorf, around engineering and sales enablement,” Robertson said. “These resources reside in the SAP development labs and work hand in hand with their engineers on a mission to drive innovation. SAP leverages our Walldorf team as part of the innovation process, which is extended through the sales and marketing process to drive joint sales and marketing initiatives, so that we go to market with a set of solution offerings and consistent message for our joint customers.”
Robertson highlighted the announcements Lenovo made with integrators CSC, Bluefin and iOLAP around jointly created solutions based on SAP HANA.
“Bluefin has a strong focus on S/4 HANA with bundles for it to drive its adoption, and their having a standard set of configurations and templates that can be deployed at customers helps simplify the whole sales process and simplify the selling cycle,” Robertson said. “We have done a number of projects with them going back to IBM. Now we have announced we have partnered with them to introduce an Internet of Things solution. Bluefin integrated the SAP HANA database on the back end, and with Eddystone beacons throughout our booth here, we can track activities of those with an app installed on their Motorola phone around the booth, to follow traffic flow.” The offering will support real-time data access and predictive analytics from Lenovo devices like YOGA tablets and ThinkPad laptops.
“CSC also has a cybersecurity offering, Greenlight, which is on the SAP resell list,” Robertson said. “It’s a unique new application area that many customers are looking to invest in. The solution with CSC combines Lenovo x86 servers utilizing SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA and Cyber Security with Greenlight to reduce security and regulatory compliance risks with the simplicity of automated processes.
The offering with analytics-focused integrator iOLAP provides customers with end-to-end implementation services for SAP HANA, from jumpstart and assessment to full migrations and design optimization.
“These offerings they have to provide an end-to-end assessment of an SAP landscape and how to migrate it to HANA lets our Lenovo services provide deeper value, enabling them to do that whole assessment with optimal recommendations on things like license purchase and systems size for their HANA systems,” Robertson said.
Lenovo also announced a new, smart data-tiering solution for SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA that manages “warm” data.
“This combines enhanced capabilities for Business Warehouse and analytics capabilities with scale out capabilities,” Robertson said. “It provides the capability in the Business Warehouse cluster to add an extension node for warm data, so the customer can use a larger percentage of system memory for warm data.”
Lenovo also announced expanded memory support for solutions running on SAP HANA using systems with next-generation Intel processors.
“This will provide a 33 per cent increase in memory for SAP S/4HANA customers who need the headroom,” Robertson said. Lenovo intends to support up to eight-socket, 8TB configurations with new systems integrating the new Intel processors and SAP HANA SPS12.
Finally, Lenovo demonstrated their HX hyperconverged solutions for SAP Business Suite applications running on SAP NetWeaver, that stem from their relationship with Nutanix that began last fall.
“The Nutanix relationship began in November, and we saw our first product in January,” Robertson said. “This is the first SAP event where we have been able to promote the HX, which is certified by SAP Business Suite applications. It provides the ability to consolidate those application tiers, and simplify management with the hyper-converged infrastructure. We are positioning it for classical SAP customers.”
