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Why Companies Choose Protera to Manage their Enterprise Workloads

 

Security and agility are top-of-mind for CIOs and other business leaders as their organizations face a number of economic headwinds in today’s firmly post-pandemic environment.

Inflation and ongoing recession concerns now demand greater financial visibility and spending transparency. Lingering pandemic impacts and sociopolitical conflicts have put supply chain security at risk. At the same time, elevated customer expectations in every industry have raised the bar around the value that companies must deliver.

To navigate all this and more, companies must have properly-designed and well-architected IT infrastructures on the cloud — the key to unlocking the innovation capabilities needed to keep pace with fast-changing and often unpredictable conditions.

SAP organizations in particular have an opportunity to leverage the system’s vast array of features to gain competitive advantages, and hiring a trusted managed services provider like Protera can help you do it with confidence.

Protera delivers modern cloud services and other comprehensive offerings that can level up your ability to innovate and drive value, while also providing the SAP experience and expertise you need to execute successfully and maximize ROI.

In this article, we’ll explore why leading organizations are choosing Protera to manage their enterprise workloads, including specific benefits and real-world examples of how Protera clients have achieved powerful results.

Quick Takeaways

  • Protera is a leading SAP-certified provider of comprehensive modern cloud services.
  • Specific services provided by Protera include cloud migration and modernization, data intelligence, IT security and governance, and SAP managed services.
  • Clients choose Protera to access SAP and cloud expertise, achieve cost savings, and get superior service to help them deliver real business value.
  • Real Protera success stories include clients from across industries, including clean beauty company Beautycounter and global tennis shoe manufacturer K-SWISS.

Who is Protera?

Protera is a pioneer of SAP cloud management. We migrated and managed the first-ever production instance of SAP on the public cloud, and today we run thousands of SAP and related applications on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

For over 25 years, our mission has been to empower enterprises to achieve their modernization objectives with improved value, increased quality, and reduced risk.

We help clients modernize, optimize, and secure their enterprise workloads in the cloud through a number of comprehensive services:

  • Cloud Modernization - Modern services that ensure your systems are secure and available with a comprehensive support model providing DevOps, SecOps, and FinOps best practices
  • SAP Migration - Automation backed migration of SAP and ancillary workloads to AWS or Microsoft Azure with minimal business impact, less risk, and reduced time
  • SAP Managed Services - Full stack managed services with the deepest of SAP BASIS expertise, full visibility into SLAs and cost, comprehensive technical infrastructure management, and a proactive support model focused on continuous innovation
  • Data Intelligence - End-to-end, cost effective data intelligence strategy and management to drive greater insight and inform real-time, data-driven decisions
  • IT Security and Governance - Our integrated SecOps model creates a security baseline for comprehensive governance and managed services to enable continuous security posture reporting
  • Disaster Recovery - Ensures all areas of the business are tested systematically and regularly so that critical physical and virtual IT workloads are kept safe and kept running, while also equipping for rapid recovery in case of an urgent real-world situation

Decades of experience with SAP have earned us multiple certifications and recognitions, including global SAP® partner certification in Hosting, as well as Cloud, Application Management, Global Outsourcing, and SAP HANA Operations.

Why do clients choose Protera’s modern cloud services?

It’s no secret that Protera isn’t the only option on the market for enterprise-level modern cloud services — so why do so many leading organizations choose us as their provider? It comes down to three key benefits:

SAP and Cloud Expertise

SAP is a unique enterprise system requiring skilled, experienced members on your team that can handle the complexities and day to day maintenance. Cloud is a completely different skill set, requiring deep solution architecture experience and relationships with top tier hyperscalers to have the most up to date information and access to new technologies as fast as they are being developed.

Protera’s clients, even those with lean IT teams, are able to focus on adding value up the stack while their SAP workloads and cloud environment are fully maintained. Clients operate with confidence backed by Protera’s proactive support model, knowing that routine processes or unexpected challenges will be handled with knowledge and care.

Cost Savings

By accelerating cloud adoption through automation-backed technologies and maximizing performance through optimization, Protera helps clients realize cost savings of anywhere from 30-50% — again, enabling resources to be redirected toward mission-critical and growth-focused activities.

We do this by helping organizations continuously improve, understanding that in the business world, technology and best practices never stop evolving — and neither can our clients.

Superior Service

Protera’s customer satisfaction and client retention rate is a reflection on the  highly personalized service that clients count on to address unique business needs and goals.

No two clients are the same, and our comprehensive offerings can be tailored to the business outcomes of our clients.

Superior Service

To summarize the collective key takeaways from the RISE with SAP FAQs outlined in the previous section, there are specific considerations that must be top-of-mind as you embark on your RISE with SAP migration.

Real-World Results from Protera Clients

Beautycounter Increases Inventory Accuracy with S/4HANA

Beautycounter is a direct sales led clean beauty company that’s experienced explosive growth since its founding in 2011. When their legacy system of record was no longer able to scale with them, company leaders made the smart decision to implement S/4HANA on AWS.

When their S/4HANA implementation stalled, Beautycounter turned to Protera for guidance on getting the project back on track. In just six months, Protera helped them implement SAP ECC, PO, and Webdispatcher on AWS and continued to provide ongoing support through a managed service model.

Beautycounter has since worked with Protera to transform to SAP S/4HANA version 1610. They leaned heavily on Protera during the transition to a new distributor to improve their supply chain. Most recently, they upgraded to SAP S/4HANA version 2020 in just 12 weeks to achieve significant improvements around scalability and functionality.

“As a lean IT team, we need to focus on driving value for the business,” says Beautycounter Sr. Director of Enterprise Applications, Nick Lyons. “Protera frees us up to do just that while continuously bringing new and innovative ways to improve performance and maximize our investment.”

Read the Full Beautycounter Case Study

Greenskies Increases Operations 6X with S/4HANA on the Cloud

Greenskies is a fully integrated commercial solar developer committed to increasing efficiencies and reducing overhead costs through process and technology improvements. In 2014, they partnered with Protera to replace their legacy ERP system and modernize their IT infrastructure.

Soon after, Greenskies realized that migrating to the cloud was key to achieving their goals of reducing costs, increasing scalability, and boosting operating flexibility over the long term. They migrated the company’s SAP workloads to SAP S/4HANA on AWS using Protera’s proprietary cloud modernization platform, Protera Arion.

Since moving to the cloud, Greenskies has grown its operating portfolio by a staggering 600% while only doubling its workforce.

“We’re always trying to stay ahead of the curve on our technical solutioning, driving efficiencies in our business,” said Eric Zenner, Vice President of Process and Technologies at Greenskies. “Protera has been a trusted partner willing to jump into new projects and spend the extra time to get it right.”

Read the Full Greenskies Case Study

Spartech Navigates Big Changes Seamlessly with SAP on Azure

Spartech is a St.Louis-based plastics innovator and manufacturer. At the time they partnered with Protera, they were faced with a six-month window to carve out SAP ECC, BW and non-SAP applications into a separate business from a larger chemical company due to a divestiture.

Spartech CIO, John Vandeven, knew he needed to look externally to augment his IT team and manage the SAP application from the separation through ongoing support.

“I did not want just a third-party vendor – it was critical that we had a good business partner,” said Vandeven.

As experts in SAP on Azure, Protera architected a solution that maintained business continuity while cutting costs, and offered the speed, availability, and flexibility to support Spartech’s large chain of 24/7 manufacturing facilities.

Spartech was able to migrate a massive amount of data to the Azure cloud with zero disruption to business operations, and today they’re able to provide more efficient, flexible services to their customers — something they consider a critical part of their strategy of continued organic growth in a specialty market scenario.

Read the Full Spartech Case Study

K-SWISS Improves Security and Operations while Reducing Costs

Leading San Francisco-based tennis shoe manufacturer K-SWISS needed to modernize their IT infrastructure to support their growing global expansion and prepare for a full transformation to SAP S/4HANA.

After migrating their legacy on-premise system to the private cloud, K-SWISS still faced unstable operating costs and unreliable service from their cloud provider. They decided to partner with Protera to achieve a more agile IT environment at a fixed cost.

Protera was able to provide an automated assessment of their target environment in just 48 hours using Protera Flexbridge, and provided a full target architecture, list of remediation items, and details on project timeline and cost.

K-SWISS migrated to SAP on AWS and hired Protera for ongoing management of their SAP systems, but soon found themselves facing an additional challenge after being acquired by a company headquartered in China. They needed to integrate their global systems.

Protera provided a migration and management solution to this challenge that now serves as a model for K-SWISS’ parent company for future acquisitions.

“All of our global systems needed to talk to one another. This challenge was solved with Protera and AWS, leveraging all AWS networking technology to connect the systems,” said Bob Sobel, K-SWISS’ Director of IT Infrastructure.

Read the Full K-SWISS Case Study

Transform Your SAP Enterprise with Protera

Protera’s comprehensive offerings include top-quality modern cloud services that help clients deliver business value while achieving critical capabilities — greater operating flexibility, higher efficiency, and increased security and agility across the IT landscape (among others).

 

No matter what your goals are for SAP on the cloud, Protera can build a solution that meets your unique needs. Schedule a time to meet with our sales team and learn more about how we can help you transform your business.
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