This interview in my series on Global Technology Partners is focused on
Cisco.
As you’ve seen in the first two posts, on
Dell and
Virtustream, I pose the same questions to each partner. This provides you with a view into the 360 relationship we share as customers, suppliers, co-innovators, and go-to-market partners.
1. What’s your elevator pitch – introduce your company please….
Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT, networking, and cybersecurity solutions. We help companies of all sizes transform how people connect, communicate, and collaborate, helping society seize tomorrow’s digital opportunity today.
We connect everything—people, process, data, and things—and we use those connections to help change our world for the better. And we’re doing it faster than ever before, in ways we believe no one else can.
We innovate everywhere to create fresh ideas and possibilities. We take bold risks to shape the future because we understand every failure is a success if we learn from it.
With our commitment to providing a highly secure, intelligent platform for digital business, Cisco is firmly focused on being the most strategic partner for our customers.
2. Please discuss your experience drinking SAP’s “champagne”….
Intelligence is a business’ biggest asset and use to only live inside the four walls of a company’s business. But the world has changed in size, speed and scale and the only way to keep up is to move beyond the world of today and into the world of tomorrow where intelligence is happening at the front lines of business. Cisco and SAP are highly aligned, together providing the bridge from a business being merely smart to being truly intelligent by activating intelligence everywhere a business reaches – securely connecting, collecting, analyzing and ultimately converting this data into actionable insights – enhancing business outcomes and customer experiences.
3. How do you prioritize certified solutions for the SAP ecosystem?
SAP Data Hub on Cisco Container Platform quickly creates powerful data pipelines. Data Hub is SAP's big data visualization and management tool. It allows users to see data from across their company's entire data landscape, pulling it from sources like Hadoop, Amazon S3, SAP HANA and business suite. And the quickest way to get it up and running on-premises is by deploying it in conjunction with Cisco Container Platform.
Cisco DNA Spaces provides wireless customers with rich location-based services, including location analytics, business insights, customer engagement toolkits, asset management, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) management, and location data APIs. To date, we are live at more than 35,000 locations across 2 billion square feet. Cisco DNA Spaces enables the integration of on-location behavior data of people and things into SAP software to gather new business insights.
Data Center Solutions for SAP - The Cisco UCS & Hyperflex scalable, high performance platform for SAP HANA and SAP solutions are the first policy-based solutions for multicloud SAP infrastructure, helping to build a bridge between SAP data and intelligence. With Cisco, customers can unleash the potential of their SAP application data, accelerate SAP application delivery, and produce better business outcomes with Cisco’s resilient and secure, intelligent infrastructure for SAP.
AppDynamics for SAP delivers code-level visibility to instrument SAP applications and optimize performance. Enterprises running SAP business applications as part of their core systems of record can’t afford failures. Unlike other APM providers who utilize wire data for diagnostics, Cisco’s SAP Monitoring solution delivers code-level visibility to optimize performance — because every second counts.
4. Who cares? I mean really – why should customers care about our partnership?
Enterprise businesses are looking for ways to maximize the value of their SAP environments
Businesses are at an inflection point with their SAP deployment. Relying on traditional data centers creates silos for SAP applications, inhibits the speed and flow of data across an organization, and reduces innovation and functionality. To remain competitive, businesses are looking to modernize and expand their infrastructure by upgrading from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, transition to the cloud, or implement new SAP modules. This transition can help lay the foundation for new innovation while maximizing the value of existing SAP environments.
But building and supporting a robust SAP ecosystem is complex, requiring multiple vendors and creating unintended problems
In order to deploy, support, and then maximize the value of a complete SAP solution, multiple vendors are required to provide and implement the hardware, network, security, cloud data center, and more. But combining multiple vendors at different levels raises the complexity of the solution, greatly increases cost, and requires support from multiple parties. Therefore, businesses are looking for a SAP partner who can offer a comprehensive approach to modernization and has the experience and expertise to make an immediate and long-term impact.
What’s SAP customers need is a single partner that supports and drives value from solutions across the SAP ecosystem
Cisco is the only choice for deploying the complete SAP solution with infrastructure that is built in concert with SAP. This includes world-class hardware and software solutions within data centers, Cloud, collaboration, and products like AppDynamics, Cisco DNA Spaces, and more. Cisco helps you maximize the value of your existing SAP investment and add valuable new cloud-native capabilities to help your business thrive now and into the future
5. As a trusted partner, when should SAP customers consider contacting you?
Cisco is a Platinum Global Technology partner. Typical engagement types include building, extending and developing solutions.
The partnership with SAP is extremely valuable and one example of this evolves around enabling multicloud. Almost all enterprises have data and applications that need to stay on-premise, but also want to take advantage of the cloud to get to the innovation that enables them to compete better. When you combine the capabilities of SAP and Cisco, we’re able to deliver solutions that enable customers to do just that. SAP and Cisco together help simplify this world and give customers options to enable them to move quickly while still taking advantage of new technologies.
6. Please discuss how SAP drinks your “champagne” ….
Cisco provides the technology to enable SAP customers to start by running a Kubernetes platform on-premise at the customer site. This approach also provides customers the option to grow into the cloud in a seamless way having the same procedures and operations running into the cloud. Ultimately, this gives choice to the customer.
In fact, the new normal for enterprises is Multicloud, which includes Hybrid, as most enterprises have on-premise capabilities. This new world is much more complicated than enterprises expected, as they thought migrating to the cloud would simplify things. Enterprises are discovering that the reality of a multicloud world is actually quite complex.
Cisco and SAP have a common vision for the potential and importance of Kubernetes to enterprise software. This common vision helped motivate Cisco and SAP to bring together SAP Data Hub and Cisco Container Platform into a single solution. By integrating these technologies and giving customer confidence around the performance and reliability they are going to achieve, this gives customers great options going forward. Ultimately, SAP Data Hub integrated with Cisco Container Platform enables customers to start on-premise, but then grow into any type of cloud.
Cisco and SAP then took this one step further by integrating with Cisco HyperFlex. This enables customers to buy a single stack, from the hardware all the way up to SAP Data Hub to get predictable performance and consistent support.
7. As an SAP ecosystem ally, how do you educate SAP customers on our joint potential to digitize & transform their business?
To help educate SAP customers on Cisco and SAP joint solutions, Cisco’s Account Teams are happy set up individual briefings. In addition, SAP and Cisco host events to introduce customers to our joint solutions. And for customers visiting SAP headquarters in Walldorf, they are invited to visit the Cisco SAP Competency Center.
Looking for more information? Visit the
Cisco and SAP site.
