Month: September 2019

The Right Time to Migrate to SAP S/4 HANA

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SAP HANA is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software vividly used amongst the business giants. Is it the right time for SAP S/4 HANA migration?

SAP announced that by 2025, it will pull the plug on support for Business suite, effectively requiring enterprises users to move to the next-generation ERP platform, S/4 HANA . The list of SAP Software that will be affected incorporates SAP Business Suite which has components of PLM, SCM, and CRM. Alongside this intrusion, SAP will likewise finish its upkeep for SAP ERP Central Component or ECC.

Landscaping SAP Transformation in Context

Hardware: SAP users are now actively moving to the cloud, however, most keep up key applications on-premise yet. To help those ERP applications, you have made considerable interests in equipment, vitality, framework and different costs identified with that hardware.

However, the advantages of the cloud are convincing enough that not many organizations intend to remain on-premise over the long haul. Subsequently, investing in new hardware it is favorable to migrate all to the cloud.

Hosting Service Model: SAP Suite on HANA and S/4HANA are intended for the cloud. The objective is an encounter like SaaS — an always improving tool, with consistent execution and extremely low downtime— yet with adaptability and power SaaS can’t provide.

You’ll require a managed service provider with the specialized abilities and inside procedures to consistently tune, upgrade your system. In a huge organization, that is a critical change.

Other Software and Services: Your organization may rely upon legacy or third party integration for CRM, HR or different zones, alongside SaaS applications. To meet the SAP HANA 2025 due date, you’ll have to guarantee your organization can keep up business stream among SAP and other software. S/4HANA offers support to you for the previously depended third party providers.

These are key choices that will influence cost, efficiency and mechanical capacities going ahead — you can’t stand to leave them until the latest possible time.

Journey to SAP HANA 2025

The initial step to surveying your advancement is understanding what you have to achieve by 2025. There are four principle ventures in your voyage:

  • Migrating to a New Platform

It’s conceivable to stay on-premise, however, most organizations will get the best incentive in the cloud. If you do stay on-premise, you’ll have to buy new hardware— either purchasing an SAP HANA appliance or adding to your current equipment to assemble a cluster equipped for running HANA.

  • Database Upgradation to HANA

If you’re running legacy SAP, you can move it legitimately onto HANA before moving up to the new programming. Nonetheless, contingent upon how exceptional your scene is, this may require a few updates to later forms of your present application suite, just as different changes.

  • Updating Application Suite

If you’re running SAP ECC/ERP, you will move to S/4HANA roadmap technologies. In case you’re running an application that hasn’t been completely coordinated to SAP HANA, you may have an alternate goal. For instance, SAP BW should be moved up to BW/4HANA. This progression might be joined with the database redesign, whenever desired.

  • Continuous Upgrades

Once you’re on S/4HANA, in a perfect world you ought to play out a little update at regular intervals to stay aware of SAP’s new releases and functionalities. This will guarantee you comply with the 2025 time constraint. In case you’re on another framework, for example, BW/4HANA or C/4HANA, you’ll have somewhat more work to do later on, as SAP completely incorporates your product into the S/4HANA suite.

Time to prepare infrastructure for SAP S/4 HANA Migration

It may seem like 2025 is the long way, but the SAP users who are thinking about S/4 HANA migration should start making their infrastructure plans. There is a due date of December 31, 2025, for SAP to end any updates, security, and backing for clients on the legacy programming based software. This implies clients will discover they never again can get to the official help to determine specialized inquiries.

SAP advancement organizations may begin to see a major convergence of projects to take on soon and that can prompt deficiencies and consequently, the interest is anticipated to drive up the expense of these administrations. If you are a little to medium-sized endeavor you will need to hop into the Migration procedure soon before assets become tough to be available.

Stay Away from a Double Move

At the point when organizations attempt to utilize their very own IT department to maintain the business and handle the movements of all their product, they can keep running into real roadblocks and bottlenecks to be coming soon. This winds up expanding the ideal opportunity for relocation, adding to expenses and potential information misfortune.

You need to ensure your IT department keeps managing and maintaining up inside procedures to maintain your business while an expert SAP development company like Stridely Solutions with their experienced SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA consultants help you with the migration. They make sure to understand your business objectives and assist you with the prominent solution with absolute value to your investment.

Having SAP specialists aid the movement is the most ideal approach to approach this progress.

Future Proof with SAP S/4 HANA Enhancement

Driving your organization forward methods putting resources into the most recent innovation with SAP S/4HANA. Once changed to SAP S/4HANA you can start making new SAP custom development enhancement and solutions that will keep your organization developing.

Holding up 2 or 3 years not far off to move expands your danger of issues with legacy programming. SAP needs the entirety of its clients to have the new experience, Artificial Intelligence, and other new advancements that are being leveraged towards SAP’s S/4HANA innovative solutions.

 

 

4 best methods to opt for while deploying DevOps for SAP Cloud Platform

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SAP cloud is one of the trending platforms aiming to automate the digital workforce. With respect to DevOps, the implementation could either be a combined approach or one that allows SAP integration with DevOps on a standalone environment. Disregarding whichever is the case, it becomes imperative for the leaders and the tech enthusiasts to keep track of the various elements in the adoption of the SAP cloud portal for DevOps.

Going by its definition, DevOps are itself the amalgamation of development and the operational team so as to turn the entire process of developing more robust and result-driven. The same is more about a contingent approach entailing an efficient and agile methodology for both the phase of software development.

Needless to state that, incorporating a DevOps team not only enhances the workflow but also minimizes the risk of errors. In a nutshell, DevOps can be regarded as the set of tools, technologies, and practices embedded within an organization with the aim of rendering industry-specific solutions.

The above was added to the growing popularity of DevOps and many SAP working teams have collaborated with the same to follow a customized path. The same is the case with the SAP Cloud Platform. However, before getting along with the implementation process, it is important for you as a leader to know about the vital aspects that are part of the integration process or how to implement DevOps operations in SAP Cloud Platform.

Use Shared DevOps Toolchain

It is often seen that business managers advice the software team to make use of an enterprise-standard Git repository as and when needed instead of opting for the repository support of SAP Cloud Platform’s Git. When integrating DevOps path in the SAP cloud platform, a piece of similar advice is given when it comes to continuous integration tools, like the Drone and Jenkins; or for that matter the tools of Agile management, including the Jira tool and the Azure DevOps; or the monitoring tools.

Now consider the case where the development team isn’t aware of what the various tools areas used across the enterprise or maybe that the company is, yet to adopt the kind of DevOps Toolchain, how would employees ensure a ubiquitous data access? In this scenario, using the SAP Cloud Platform tools definitely, appear handy. However, the above solution is bound to cause cost overheads in the long term. The fact that using SAP Cloud platform tools integrate unnecessary lock-in and limited features, the cost of operation rises high. For instance, the SAP Cloud Platform’s Git repository infrastructure does not have the majority of the features of GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps, and hence, it becomes overhead to access the same from external Cloud Platform environment of SAP.

Be Flexible In Development Tooling

We see even the most skilled people carrying their own tools to the job. So, why is it that the developers need to use tools that are set as the standards by the company? Of course, the company owns it and pays for it without question, but as evident the SAP cloud platform does not entail mandatory use of tools accessible enterprise-wide.

True that at times, few of the tools are mandatory and have to be shared. From version control to ticketing systems or the build systems, these need to be the same across the enterprise. But, the above said tools had to have a standard interface that enables the skilled developers to connect to any other choice of tools as desired.

For instance, WebIDE needs to be the default, but there is no need for the developers to use it. Before integrating the DevOps path for the SAP Cloud Platform, it is important that some work is done to place the infrastructure in place and give developers’ much-needed freedom.

Use of Sub-accounts

A major aspect where we see customers having a tough time is struggling to find out which of the available abstractions should be used with respect to the tiered landscapes. Like whether the QA, development, and environment of production have to be separated in terms of applications, or have different Sub-accounts or different spaces for HANA?

Here, arises the need or the answer to creating distinct subaccounts for an array of varied environment landscapes. The above might account for a huge amount of infrastructure duplication, as when the team is working on the HANA Database, it might so happen that they need to have their different HANA instances with respect to the three-tier landscape.

Now, this is a problem and you need to have a solution for the same, right? How about using a DevOps infrastructure in order to have the tier removed. Would this work?

Consider, you are using the Cloud Application Programming Model (CAPM). So would you really need a development tier here? Or, is it possible for the developers to perform the local development utilizing the modules of CAPM Node.js and the local database of SQLite.

Using SAP Proprietary Tools

Last is the usage of SAP proprietary tools that are present in the SAP cloud platforms for the developers to use as and when required. Now you might give weight to the shared infrastructure but given the need to use the same offline, you can always switch to SAP portal proprietary tools.

  • When ABAP developers need to add value to the environment of the Cloud, the SAP Cloud Platform is perfect.
  • Or, when the Cloud ALM, Translation Services or the Leonardo machine learning services are the ones that need to be put to use, the SAP Cloud Platform serves the need best.

Conclusion

Having said all of the above, it’s your job now to figure out how to use these and exactly when do you need to switch between the shared infrastructure and the SAP cloud platform. It is important that this stay attuned with the basic functioning of your organization and be implemented across all layers of abstraction. No matter what do you, be sure that your actions are in the best interest of the organization and capable of reaping profits in the long term.

 

 

Top Reasons to use WordPress Multisite CMS

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Designing and developing websites for a business is no longer the topic of debate. The need to digitize the business economy while giving users the ease to shop, alone justifies the creation of a website. Thanks to the prevalence of WordPress, business owners can now easily create and manage websites without having the need to manually design and incorporate features.

WordPress being of the most common content management platform offers a vast repository of plugins and themes, designed to help entrepreneurs create compelling websites. Also, the admin portal of the website is user-friendly, aiding swift management of backend processes.

Often, organizations have multiple products and services and it is seen that they prefer having distinct websites for each. For instance, consider a business dealing in electronics, automobile, and fashion products. Instead of stuffing all in a single site, business owners prefer having different sites for each. Now, this is extremely beneficial as users can individually refer to a site.

The problem arises in managing and monitoring the site. Every time there is an update, the developer would need to log in to the sites individually, and make changes. Switching between different portals now and then, creating a mess and is also inconvenient.

This is where the idea of multisite CMS pops in.

WordPress as Multisite CMS

For organizations that have more than one business website, hosting them on different platforms is a tedious task. WordPress allows such business owners to have a single WordPress registration and use it to host more than one website.

There exists a single database and all of the details from the websites are stored in it distinctly. In case, you are wondering why business entrepreneurs should opt for multisite CMS, the list can be exhaustive. Yet, we are here outlining the benefits of using multisite WordPress CMS to host all your business websites.

  • A Central Repository To Manage All Assets

    One of the common and the promising advantages of using multisite WordPress CMS is the fact that it comes with a centralized repository to store and manage all assets. Imagine that you have three different websites but the content embedded in the form of blogs, videos and audios remains the same. In such a case, managing them separately is difficult, let alone the fact that this creates duplicate data.

    On the contrary, WordPress multisite CMS leads to the creation of a single database that stores all kinds of data. This in a way eliminates all possibility of redundant information and at the same time, eases the job of maintaining assets. Changes made in one set are automatically updated across all websites.

  • A Site Registration

    Whether it is about registering for different sites or uploading themes or releasing an update, the WordPress multisite CMS is the one-stop-shop solution for all. When you have more than one website for your business, you need to keep track of each of them separately ensuring that none of them are outdated or requires an update. Manually checking every site consumes a great amount of time, not to mention the efforts spent in switching between the admin panel.

The Solution

To ease the above, WordPress multisite CMS offers the ability to host all of the websites on a single registration. So, the next time you need to update a theme or upgrade a plugin, you can do it all in a single step. A single installation or up-gradation would reflect the changes in all of the hosted websites automatically.

  • One-Click Backup

    Working with websites, security is an important concern. It is advised that the entire website is updated and all of the data backed up in case the website stops functioning. Now imagine the time and efforts it would take to back up each of the sites individually. Yes, that huge.

    On the other hand, using WordPress multisite CMS, you can update and create the back up of all of the hosted websites in a single click. All of the files are stored in one step saving both time and resources.

  • Beneficial For The Employees

    It is not just you who undergoes the pain of monitoring different sites but also the employees within the organization. Distinct databases for different sites but for the same business makes it tough for the employees to track and assess data. Also, it becomes harder in terms of analyzing the sales and performance of the business as data is discreetly present and is redundant.

Odds of Using WordPress Multisite CMS

True that there are multiple benefits but that’s just one side of the coin. Using WordPress multisite CMS also comes with several disadvantages with the common ones being:

  • Plugin compatibility: Hosting websites on the WordPress multisite CMS limits the plugins that can be used or integrated within the website. It is seen that the majority of the plugins are designed to support single-site functionality and turn obsolete in WordPress multisite CMS.
  • Admin Powers: Individual admin no longer has the power to make changes in the same, let alone modify them.
  • Single Attack Impacts All: Since all of the sites are hosted in a single platform, a single attack or a data breach would infect all of the websites compromising their safety and data privacy.
  • Speed Issues: If one of the sites experiences huge traffic, the speed or the load time of pages of another website dramatically suffer.
  • Hosting Plans: Similar to the plugins, not all hosting plans extend their support towards WordPress multisite CMS. Before deciding on whether to opt for a multisite site or not, make sure you have selected the right plan for hosting.

The Final Word

True that WordPress multisite CMS has its own set of drawbacks and is definitely not one size that fits all solution. Yet if you have more than one business website and find it hard to maintain each of them separately, it serves the purpose best. It not only centralizes all of the business information but also maintains accuracy in the records stored, making it easier to monitor the same.

How can Big Data Boost the Revenue for Businesses?

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Though big data started a little slow yet considering the unprecedented growth of data volumes compelled enterprises to take a step ahead and vest in the technology. According to Harvard Business Review, nearly 99% of the entrepreneurs in the survey were convinced about the need to embed Big data analytics in their business sooner.  

However, another survey revealed that of this only 30% actually succeeded while others were still struggling. But hold on, this did not stop any of the organizations from trying as there has been a huge shift in ROI of the organization’s that have implemented Big data analytics in their work culture. Meaning that companies that base their decisions on real-time analytics are proven to have better returns as compared to others.  

As a matter of fact, it is the small scale companies that benefit the most when integrating big data solution to their everyday business operations. It is seen that big data help firms grab significant insights on the users’ choice and preferences which further enables them to drive their business keeping in mind the end customer and likewise, boost revenue while enhancing the entire workforce.  

Whether you are a newbie or a fifty fortune company, you would still need the flavor of big data across your business to drive maximum revenue. So, instead of debating on what, let see how big data can help your business strike maximum profit.  

Big Data Rides Business 

  • CRM & Marketing 

One of the most important aspects of any business is marketing. Where an ideal one would fetch customers, a poorly planned campaign might invite critics. No wonder why all business organizations strive to have an authentic marketing team that would target their customers so as to promote their business.  

A recent trend in the domain of marketing has been personalization. Today, marketers prefer directing customized emails or messages to specific customers targeting their choices. This in a way leads to a better and sophisticated approach which no doubt ends up in increased traffic.  

That is where big data analytics come to picture.  

Having the ideology of analyzing and assessing customers’ data, big data can help organizations determine the preferences and choices of different customers. This data further enables personalizing marketing campaigns giving users the ease to connect to your brand and likewise boost revenue.  

  • Enhanced Security 

A major reason why most of the startup companies fail is lack of security. Meaning that the environment they run their business in is vulnerable to hacks and attacks which question their credibility. 

It is seen that the post-integration of big data in business operations, organizations now employ a much safer and secured environment. The technology includes a variety of tools that automate tasks while adhering to the security standards. Needless to state that data hacks tend to put a dent in your business reputation costing you both trust and customer engagement. Hence, the adoption of big data mechanism to streamline tasks would not only better the operation flow but also safeguard your business from intruders or hackers. 

  • Sharing Data  

Startups or SMEs have one thing in common. They lack data, one that can help shape their product in such a way that it meets the expectations of the end-users. Problem-solving requires plentiful of information so that the product can adhere to the market standards. What if I say that all of this can be done without actually having the final product in hand, what if you can accelerate the time to market of your product? Data sharing is what big data aims to do.  

The technology convinces users to share personal data while being paid incentives for the same. Such data can be used by the companies to design their product narrowing down the time required to do market research and likewise, cost. The better the product, the greater the customer engagement and the higher the revenue earned.  

  • Customer Retention 

It’s been long since we saw the emergence of chatbots to connect with customers and serve them with their requests and queries. But this is just half of what big data has to offer in terms of chatbots.  

A recent study revealed that big data bots can be used as a guide that would help you design and develop your product in terms that satisfy the needs and preferences of the end-users. 

Having a dataset of customers opinion help determine which users prefer which particular feature and so you can then decide, which one to keep and which to omit. Surveys, polls or technology tracking is few methods by which one can gather user data to drive business insights and then make a real-time decision.  

  • Manage Inventory 

Big data over the cloud keeps track of all your goods in inventory and keeps you updated on the same. Merging big data tools and technologies to take over your inventory helps you attain a summarized view of the unit, eliminate bottleneck and further enhance the overall efficiency. Having access to real-time information enables store managers to better track goods and prevent stock outflow. An integrated system is more likely to etch success and drive profits when compared to a poorly managed system. 

Conclusion – The Verdict 

Having said that, it is no surprise that most of the tech giants are actively investing in technology and making use of the same to streamline their business operations while enhancing the entire infrastructure. This is just the tip of the iceberg and the technology has a lot to offer. Enterprises no longer think about why to implement but what and how to do ERP implementation.  

According to Bloomberg Businessweek Research, 97% of the companies that have adopted big data in their business mechanism report the prime reason to be better management of risk, increased profits and reduced costs. While some might debate on the data accuracy, but the ones that are using it, know about it. It is your job to find the best way to implement the technology, once done, revenue would automatically follow. 

Application Performance Management for Enterprise – Why and How?

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Software management is one of the long-standing tasks in the digital world today. Considering the fact that present-day business is primarily laser-focused, organizations are now aware of the fact that  

  • Employee & customer experience is vital for business success, and 
  • Software performance determines the above-stated experience, at large.  

Now that the software performance owns the potential to either make or break a company, it becomes imperative for the leaders and the managers to pay immense focus on driving APM or to be precise, Application Performance Management. Using tools and embedding technologies that would tie up with your development phase leading to the creation of a feature-rich application.  

Given the time where food is delivered in 30 minutes and even in some cases, 20 minutes, customers have expectations of prompt delivery. Whether you use Google or Facebook, the response time has changed the way users connect to the outer world. If your page takes even a second more to open, it is deemed as broken or slow or irresponsive. Needless to state that such a user experience might seem fatal for your business and likewise, brand value.  

Added to the above, a slower website would influence the SEO ranking affecting the rate of conversion and the revenue on a whole. Hence, it becomes imperative for business managers to employ methodologies proven to manage and monitor the performance of an application.  

Having said that, let’s have a quick look at what exactly do we mean when we say the term Application Performance Management. 

Application Performance Management 

Application Performance Management is a much wider term than we seek it to be. While for some it might appear to be similar to application monitoring but in reality, APM consists of tools that help prevent problems, resolve issues, continuously improve alongside monitoring the application.  

Now just knowing about the practice isn’t enough and one needs to be adept in the processing and organizing of the entire tool so as to drive maxim benefits. Employing a holistic approach further narrows down the hurdles that might crossfire your application while being tested and monitored. Additionally, a better approach leads to better performance, maximum resources utilization and enhanced troubleshooting.  

An efficient APM system is capable of determining the core reason behind the occurrence of an issue along with providing solutions to deal with the same. Further, the APM tools also provide support to the organizational goal of helping managers to cut down on the cost and time of management. Needless to state that driving collaboration between the business operations and the application performance fuels organizational growth on a whole.  

Detecting Issues  

The process of APM starts with the detection of anomalies and localization. Now, these mandates using tools and technologies to aid the same.  

  • Application Monitoring: This includes tracking metrics of performances, components and application tier availability added with services, OS, database, etc.  
  • Business Transaction Monitoring: This tool deals with testifying the credibility of business transactions. Meaning that determining whether the transactions were complete, legit, noting their timings and further identifying the pain points in the request query.  
  • Synthetic Monitoring: Special scripts created by the developer to automate simulation of application actions.  
  • Real-time User Monitoring: Data analytics has proven to be a groundbreaking tool. Using customer interaction data helps identify the performance of the application gaining insights on the response time, traffic and additional information.  
  • Log Analysis: Where metrics identify the possibility of an error, logs highlight the exact place that might have caused an error. This, in a way, helps you get to the root of the problem and then provide a solution.  

How to Organize APM? 

Having mentioned all of the above, you might be wondering that APM tools drive much of the process and surely they do. However, it’s not the tools alone that account for better performance but the measures you take on getting hinted of the problems by the specified tools.  

An efficient application performance management runs as:  

  • Problem Detection 

The process of application development performance management starts with running tools and detecting all of the problems and issues as incurred within the entire application.  

  • Prioritization  

Post identification of the application performance problems, next step account’s for prioritizing all of them to keep the most important one at the top and the others descend.  

  • Alerting  

Here, the concerned stakeholders or the department are alerted on the presence of problems. Issues that are largely serious gets highlighted.  

  • Isolation 

Separating the important ones from the least important ones.  

  • Diagnosis 

Here, the encountered problems are passed through the appropriate tool to find out the exact description of the problem and further outlining ways by which the same can be resolved.  

  • Repairing 

Repairing entails applying and integrating the above-suggested measures to solve the issue.  

  • Prevention  

Integrating measures so as to prevent the occurrence of the same bug again.  

  • Testing  

Once the problem is identified, worked upon and resolved, the next step requires testifying the same to detect whether the problem still persists.  

  • Reporting   

This includes drafting a report or a summary of the entire management process. Meaning that the concerned person has to be notified about the problem, steps taken to solve, the effects it laid on the entire application development, etc. An efficient reporting helps the development team be aware of the scenario and stay updated.  

The above is the entire lifecycle of APM. Each of the said processes is as important as the other. Now, the question of who is responsible to make the above possible?  

It could either be the DevOps team or a technical team or a performance engineer who takes the task to run APM tools and build in a new environment of development and management. However, it might not be possible for a single person to take over the entire process as problems could elude from anywhere or everywhere. Hence the entire organizational team linked with the project has to step forward to test and ensure that the developed application is free from glitches and would function well across all platforms and in all conditions.