IDC survey: SAP HANA users say Cisco UCS is the #1 Converged Infrastructure

“Mission Critical” is a term bandied about far too often in our industry.   But in the case of SAP HANA it’s a fair description; if your core business operations backbone is not “mission critical,” what is?

That’s why Cisco is excited to be a major sponsor of SAP’s SapphireNow user conference in Orlando this week.  For Cisco, this year’s Sapphire represents a culmination of many years of investment and meaningful engineering work to make SAP “run simple” (to borrow SAP’s tagline) on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) converged infrastructure.

In fact, we believe SAP runs better on UCS than on any other platform.  Why?  Because only Cisco offers both superior flexibility and policy-based automation for SAP HANA applications such as SAP HANA, HANA Vora and S/4 HANA.

Cisco customers, who have chosen the Cisco UCS platform for their SAP deployments, agree with us.

A 2016 IDC survey (IDC #US42198216, November 2016) of 300 respondents in N. America showed Cisco as the leading vendor for SAP HANA infrastructure.

Mohawk Industries, the world’s largest flooring company, chose a UCS VBlock solution to gain valuable real-time insights into their business.

“With SAP HANA, we’re bringing market data, machine data, and ERP system-based transactional data to one database so that all departments can get the information that they need instantly,” said Jevin Jensen, Vice President of Global Infrastructure.

Similarly, Valley Proteins uses UCS FlashStack solutions to gain a holistic view of customer purchases, supplier pricing, and individual factory performance, centralizing data from 25 remote locations to better understand the profitability of each customer and track materials and maintenance in real-time.

“With Cisco UCS, we have a solid infrastructure for SAP, enabling greater business insight than we’ve ever had before,” said Brad Wilton, Director of IT, Valley Proteins.

SAP Service Providers like CenturyLink, who sign client SLAs for secure, reliable infrastructure for HANA-as-a-Service, are also flocking to UCS.

“Our collaboration with Cisco and SAP to deliver policy-based HANA-as-a-Service for SAP analytics and other application suites, enables CenturyLink to deliver unparalleled agility, security, and governance, to enterprises via highly resilient and economical cloud services,” said Gary Gauba, Chief Enterprise Relationship Office and President of Advanced Systems Group, CenturyLink.

What’s behind Cisco’s SAP leadership position?  Innovation that enables more efficient operations
and lowers the Total Cost of Ownership for SAP.  For example, Cisco was the first SAP partner to certify:

Policy-Based TDI for efficient Management, Security, & Provisioning

A Reference Architecture and Implementation Guide for HANA Vora & Big Data

One-Click Deployment of SAP S/4 HANA and Vora

Software Defined Storage for SAP

40 Gigabit Ethernet for SAP

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for non-production HANA

Does this innovation make a difference for our customers in the real world?  In a blind study last year of SAP customers running on the Cisco UCS server platform, IDC found Cisco customers averaged 528% ROI and savings of $20.4 million over a 5 year period (IDC #US41084916 2016).

If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from the value of Cisco’s converged infrastructure for SAP, please read our press release, visit the Cisco booth at SAP Sapphire in Orlando at booth #722, or go to the Cisco web site and read more about what analysts and users are saying about Cisco UCS for SAP.