Your business depends on your SAP landscape, and the health of that landscape rests on your Basis team. Yet many businesses still treat SAP administration as an afterthought.
Whether you’re already looking for an SAP Basis managed service provider or just learning what SAP Basis is, here’s what your business needs to know about its best practices and finding the right Basis administrator.
Setting Goals to Maximize Your SAP Basis Administration
Imagine your SAP applications supported your business perfectly. What would be different? How fast would your software run? How often would it suffer slowdowns or unplanned downtime? How quickly would your SAP Basis team resolve issues? How often would there be any issues to resolve?
What about tech strategy? Where would you be on your journey to S/4HANA? How long would it take to get there? Where would your company be technologically in 6 months? What about 6 years?
Most of the questions have obvious answers. You may still be fleshing out tech strategy, but you already know what your company needs in the short term. You can and should have a SAP environment that’s a powerful competitive asset. And the right managed services team can streamline your SAP workload for you.
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Types of SAP Basis Managed Services
Managed services for Basis are scalable. Your MSP can act as:
Proactive Consultant
A proactive consultant to help you get your in-house team back on track by identifying areas for improvement, such as how to optimize system performance for seamless SAP operations.
Specialist Support
A team of experts to step in whenever your internal administrator is unavailable. This ensures expert SAP monitoring and stability, even during peak periods or unforeseen events.
Cloud and Migration Partner
A dedicated partner to plan and execute your cloud environment setup and migrate SAP to SAP HANA or other cloud platforms like AWS. This includes handling managed cloud integrations, system upgrades, and virtualization, all of which ensure a seamless transition with minimal downtime.
Core System Administration
A partner to administer your core SAP systems and manage SAP applications and infrastructure. This involves system performance tuning, health checks, database maintenance, and user access control.
Comprehensive IT Extension
An extension of your internal team to run your entire SAP landscape. This includes coordinating across different platforms (on-premises, public cloud, or hybrid environments) to optimize your managed infrastructure.Your MSP can also handle supporting services, like disaster recovery, security, compliance and hosting. They can administer both SAP and third-party applications, work with your developers to help you realize new functionality, and coordinate other stakeholders to synchronize your IT strategy with your business goals. And they should be able to do it all at a consistent service level.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
SLAs need to be clear, enforceable and strong enough to meet your performance needs. Just as importantly, they need to be backed by a technical SAP partner with a history of extremely high reliability.
SLA penalties are severe enough to incentivize your partner to perform, but they don’t provide enough compensation to make up for your losses, should you suffer a major breach such as a prolonged outage or data loss. You’re entrusting your Basis MSP with your data, your reputation and the very future of your business — make sure you choose a partner who deserves that trust.
At Protera, we address these requirements by putting our SLAs into our managed services platform. That lets our staff and our customers compare them directly to system performance and availability records, ensuring we’re consistently providing the service we’ve promised. That transparency has helped us uphold the consistent quality that our customers expect. In 20 years, we haven’t breached an SLA, and we’ve maintained 100% customer satisfaction and 98% customer renewal rates.
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Types of SAP Managed Services Providers
The vendor ecosystem is vast and provides many different Basis consultants, hosting and related services. Here are some of the main categories:
Managed Application Service Providers
A managed application provider (MAP) generally specializes strongly in a particular platform; and provides complete, ongoing service. SAP-certified MAPs can generally offer a full range of technical services, including installing, upgrading and maintaining SAP solutions.
Some MAPs (like Protera) operate their own private clouds, and support a full range of public and hybrid cloud hosting options, while others only work with third-party clouds. Vendor partnerships and technical expertise and specialization can also vary considerably between managed application providers.
Another key factor is the partner’s internal system for automating application management. Some MAPs don’t adequately leverage automation, which can increase costs and time to resolution, and slow projects.
At Protera, we see our internal processes and technology as key factors in delivering quality service. Our AppCare platform was created to simplify and accelerate our managed SAP Basis services.
That makes us more efficient, enabling us to meet aggressive timelines and provide services tailored to customers’ needs. It also makes our team better at day-to-day operations. AppCare gives our admins excellent visibility, making it easier to understand overall system trends and fine-tune performance.
Value-Added Resellers
VARs historically sold packaged solutions. They used to provide hardware and software together, configure them for the client, and generally offered some degree of ongoing support.
However, the cloud era has forced many VARs to change their approach. These days, fewer companies require hardware, and many vendors are offering pre-configured solutions for particular use cases.
Additionally, MAPs have made deployment quicker and more cost-effective, making pre-configuration less compelling. As a result, VARs have moved into managed services, and the distinction between them and system integrators (SIs) has blurred in some cases.
VARs can be a good option for some small companies with simple needs.
If you’re building a fairly standard greenfield implementation, you may find a good off-the-shelf solution. However, VARs aren’t very flexible. They offer limited configuration options and may not support brownfield migrations. Since one of the main strengths of SAP is its flexibility and configurability, a VAR usually won’t be a great match for SAP Basis consulting.
System Integrators
SIs are highly skilled specialists in designing, optimizing, and assembling SAP infrastructures. They’re generally project oriented, focusing on functional implementation more than ongoing service. When a company is planning an SAP upgrade, an SI is generally the first point of contact, and may bring in a technical partner to assist them.
We often work closely with SIs for both planning IT strategy and executing major upgrades. Some also offer ongoing Basis managed services, however they may not be able to provide everything a MAP can. They generally have less experience operating large SAP ecosystem and may have limited abilities in terms of automation and scaling.
SAP Basis Team Support: Implementing Long-Term IT Strategy
Can you remember the last time your Gmail account was updated? Probably not. SaaS vendors tweak and patch their software all the time, but unless they announce the update or make a major change in functionality or UI, you never notice. And why should you? It’s the vendor’s job to worry about that stuff.
That’s exactly how SAP should be for end users. You turn it on, and it does everything you need. There may be the need for brief downtime now and then, but it’s infrequent enough that your users barely notice.
Right now, most SAP systems are nothing like this. Companies are running legacy systems, patched together over the years using now outdated apps. And with their limited SAP Basis resources, just keeping it all working can be challenging.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The right Basis partner can transform your system into an engine of innovation, delivering the speed, visibility and analytical power of a cutting-edge business suite, with the ease of use and consistency you should expect from any software.
From delivering quick performance improvements to completing your journey to SAP S/4HANA and beyond, the right SAP Basis system management services provider can make your landscape the powerhouse it was meant to be.
Contact us to learn how Protera can help.