Manufacturers adopting SAP America software -- or almost any enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite for that matter -- are guaranteed a couple of things: a fairly extensive and resource-intensive implementation and, once completed, more data than they know what to do with.
Sure ERP suites can help them achieve enterprise-wide application integration, built around emerging Web services standards, and apply so-called "adaptive business processes" that yield greater operational intelligence and boost functional productivity. But unless manufacturers can manage the data onslaught that often ensues, they may not be able to leverage the organizational efficiencies critical to cost-justifying expensive ERP projects in the first place.
A critical aspect to achieving corporate ERP objectives is having a solid foundation for storing, accessing and archiving important enterprise data. That means creating a data management hierarchy built along the parameters of business criticality, time sensitivity and media cost. Without such rigor, ERP applications performance can seriously degrade as users sort through reams of structured and unstructured data to find, retrieve and act upon time-sensitive, business-critical information.
SAP hopes to alleviate some of this through an expanded alliance with network storage giant EMC Corp. (Hopkinton, MA). The two companies recently disclosed plans to help joint customers deploy an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy with EMC products that conform to SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), a published blueprint for building and adapting enterprise software that pivots around its NetWeaver integration application middleware.
EMC and SAP plan later in the fourth quarter to deliver a portfolio of service offerings, branded as "Enterprise Services-Ready," that the two companies say "will help SAP customers better manage corporate-wide information and fulfill their need to standardize the behavior of business processes deployed as enterprise services across the IT landscape." The offerings, built around existing EMC products and SAP services, will initially be aimed at improving the Byzantine art/science of archiving ERP data, optimizing storage architectures and helping customers more effectively contend with burgeoning regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes Oxley and industry-specific mandates in the life sciences and consumer products spaces, the two companies say.
They include:
- EMC Archiving for SAP, which uses recently acquired Documentum software to move less time sensitive SAP data to its Centera (content addressable) storage subsystem
- EMC DatabaseXtender for SAP BW, which identifies and moves older and more detailed data from SAP's Business Information Benchmark application to less expensive online disk storage
- EMC Performance Monitoring & Optimization for SAP, which will tap EMC consultants to provide a "best practice assessment" for creating application environments using storage configurations designed to meet service level agreements (SLA) and achieve lower total cost of ownership
This type of alliance is of critical importance to manufacturers, says Bill Hurley, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a Milford, MA-based market research and consulting company focused on data management issues. As ERP solutions such as mySAP ERP become more complex -- with greater functional integration across multiple modules -- and open, through middleware layers such as NetWeaver, "there are more moving parts" to manage, he says. This is driving ERP and storage management vendors to find better ways to help customers manage the greater volumes of data these applications generate.
As ERP application environments become the "lifeblood" of many organizations within and beyond manufacturing, a "lifecycle management view" of how data is made available throughout the enterprise becomes business critical, Hurley notes. ILM, he adds, should also resonate with manufacturers accustomed to the lifecycle philosophies that pervade product lifecycle management and product data management.
Although the SAP and EMC have partnered since 1997, at least one manufacturing company that uses both vendors' products was unaware of the expanded partnership. However, the company's storage management challenges, identified earlier in the decade as it standardized on SAP R/3 across its far-flung global enterprise, are indicative of the pent up demand for the products and services the partners have proposed.
"One of the frustrations I have is that we had to invent the wheel with archiving with SAP," notes Randy Carter, vice president, Infrastructure at Rohm and Haas, a Philadelphia, PA, $7 billion specialty materials manufacturer known in consumer circles for its Morton Salt brand. "If SAP and EMC get together and have a better archiving solution to snap into our environment, it's too late for us."
Carter recalled an exhaustive search for archiving products and expertise that resulted in the selection and abandonment of one white glove consulting firm and subsequent hiring of a smaller, independent company that finally completed the job using
IBM's CommonStore tools. "It's too difficult," he said of the archiving data for SAP's R/3. "It should be part of the architecture."
That's what SAP hopes to resolve with its EMC partnership -- and a similar alliance with IBM. For example, using EMC's ILM, manufacturers can create a tiered architecture to automatically migrate older data to the least expensive storage medium or keep transactional data on faster online subsystems.
Using ILM, companies can define business rules to create data classes, which create the logic necessary to move information to the most cost and time effective media, notes BJ Jenkins, EMC's vice president of global marketing. For instance, transactional data needed on-demand by a shop foreman or an account payables clerk would be kept on faster storage subsystems. Infrequently used data or historical information needed for financial reconciliation and reporting can be automatically moved offline to archival storage systems. For data needed to meet audit requirements, for example, "you don't need sub-second access," he points out.
SAP and EMC share approximately 4,000 joint customers, a not surprising figure given the global footprint of both vendors. In working with SAP and other partners, EMC sees companies, regardless of vertical market, wrestling with storage management issues in three ways. They are either: consolidating and creating a tiered storage management infrastructure; taking an application-specific approach by backing up and archiving key data, such as e-mail; or embracing an enterprise-wide approach by building data classes and creating automatic migration policies.
Many manufacturers whose livelihood revolves around ERP applications are beginning to embrace a tiered infrastructure, Jenkins says. "Automotive has been on this journey for some time ... and is deep into the application part of ILM." Pharmaceuticals companies that need to manage wads of unstructured data and documents see a tiered storage approach as helping ensure regulatory compliance when seeking to meet inflexible bureaucratic requirements, he notes.
The consultative offering will be critical in this pursuit and is modeled around
SAP America services, notes Paul Brown, EMC's senior director of alliances. "Service offerings are designed to get [ILM] deployed more quickly," Jenkins adds. "[And] span the lifecycle."
The services are also helpful when SAP customers begin migrating from R/3 to mySAP ERP and incorporate NetWeaver in creating Web services built around a service-oriented architecture, Jenkins notes. The client will tap SAP to lead the engagement and bring together team members with appropriate skills. "This gives customers one face rather than having to coordinate 27 people," Brown explains.
This could be of use to Rohm and Haas, which is still evaluating mySAP ERP and is taking time to assess the architectural opportunities afforded by NetWeaver. Meanwhile, it continues to leverage EMC in creating a tiered storage architecture that covers enterprise operations, including disaster recovery.
Today, all of Rohm and Haas' data is stored on a mix of premium and low-cost EMC storage subsystems -- some of it online, the rest archived offline -- to balance total cost of ownership with accessibility, says Joe Mammarella, ERP IT technology support. Like other companies that have experienced data storage bloat, Rohm and Haas has recently begun to rely more heavily on archiving (Gartner Inc. research estimates that 70% to 90% storage growth is not uncommon).
"It helps a little, but does not take a huge chunk out of growth," Mammarella says, noting that large-scale enterprise shops can no longer count on storage costs dropping 40% a year to help balance out their data management expense lines. "We've been told that will stop ... costs came down so quickly that [vendors] have leveraged a lot of their ability to use cheaper storage and increase productivity."
As storage vendors hit the proverbial cost-per-gigabyte wall, the onus shifts to SAP and EMC to develop solutions that ease upgrades and enable more robust archiving. Still, the two vendors have much work to do to turn concepts such as ILM and ESA into reality and to educate manufacturers on the necessity of lifecycle storage management concepts, beyond the early adopters.
"This isn't just a marketing relationship, but a robust engineering relationship with SAP still having some very heavy lifting to do," Hurley concludes.