
IBM next quarter will make available an instance of the managed RISE service provided by SAP that can be deployed on virtual IBM Power servers.
Tom McPherson, general manager for IBM Power, said the RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server service will make it simpler for organizations that are moving away from deploying and managing SAP applications to employ the same core platform many of them already use to run those applications in an on-premises IT environment.
Itโs not clear how many organizations are opting to rely on services from SAP to run these applications, but there are now more than 7,000, said McPherson. Rather than deploying and managing customized instances of SAP applications, many organizations are opting to standardize on a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications managed by SAP. If they want to extend those applications, SAP makes available a cloud service for building and deploying customizations without requiring any changes to the core code managed by SAP.
IBM itself over an 18-month period moved its quote-to-cash and record-to-report processes to RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server. That project spanned more than 150,000 end users located across 175 countries, with IBM reporting that as it rationalized servers it saw a 30% reduction in infrastructure costs.
Regardless of approach, the managed services provided via the RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server service are going to be co-managed by IBM and SAP, noted McPherson.
The degree to which organizations favor a managed service is often determined by how much access they have to capital, noted McPherson. In the oil and gas industry, for example, there is a greater tendency toward acquiring IT infrastructure given the size of the IT infrastructure budgets available. In contrast, other segments tend to prefer treating IT investments as an operating expense that they can more easily scale up and down as economic conditions fluctuate, said McPherson.
At the same time, many organizations are also looking to expose SAP data to artificial intelligence (AI) models that are easier to build and maintain using graphical processor units (GPUs) that IBM makes available on its cloud service, he added.
Ultimately, IBM is ready to meet customers wherever they happen to be when it comes to consuming IT infrastructure, said McPherson. Many of those customers, for example, might be willing to consume certain SAP applications as a service, while for compliance reasons opting to run others in an on-premises IT environment, he noted.
Each organization will need to determine how much economic sense a managed SAP service makes, but in many cases the applications being run donโt provide a lot of competitive advantage. They instead are applications that every large enterprise needs to run, so relying on a service should free up more internal resources to build and deploy applications that add more value to the business.
The one thing that is certain, however, is that the expertise required to successfully deploy IBM Power server is getting harder to find and retain in an era where other classes of processors have become, from a usage perspective, a lot more dominant.