Understanding the Benefits and Cost Savings of the SUSE and Intel Server Platform for SAP Environments

Many enterprises rearchitect their infrastructure and processes for SAP S/4HANA, seeking opportunities to reduce costs, eliminate downtime and realize faster time-to-value. A study was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SUSE and Intel®, and published in August 2022. “The Total Economic Impact^TM Of SUSE Solutions For SAP Environments Powered by Intel Technology” presents Forrester’s findings concerning the savings and business benefits organizations can achieve with the SUSE and Intel server platforms.

In the Forrester study, the experiences of interviewees and survey respondents were aggregated into a single composite organization, a global manufacturing firm using SAP S/4HANA in a private cloud deployment with 5,000 employees. Benefits of the SUSE and Intel server platform include improved IT productivity, reduced IT costs, and quantified business impact.

Reduced operational and maintenance costs

Manual installation and configuration impact how quickly applications can be deployed. In the Forrester study, “After the investment in the SUSE and Intel server platform, the organizations were able to reduce the time it took their IT departments to deploy SAP landscapes, which enabled faster time-to-value of SAP applications.”

Plus, SAP administrators’ routine maintenance workloads were reduced, and they were able to “ensure better data availability and faster query response times for their business users.” Further, they could “improve SAP system uptime and save on third-party system management tools.”

Reduced business outages

Maintaining uptime is critical to any business, especially those whose clients and partners rely on real-time data exchange. Applying server patches without rebooting can eliminate the need for IT to spend valuable time on maintenance, improving an organization’s business agility.

The Forrester study considered the impact of outages. Before implementing the SUSE and Intel platform, interviewees and respondents experienced “up to 12 business outages associated with their SAP environments per year.” Yet Forrester notes that the composite organization “reduces the number of SAP system outages and unlocks opportunities for additional revenue streams.”

Improved security

Implementing the SUSE and Intel platforms provides new data and platform security capabilities. For example, SUSE provides SAP-specific security features like HANA Firewall which integrates antivirus with SAP or SAP HANA-hardening guides.

Ability to retire legacy tools

Before moving to the SUSE and Intel server platforms, the interviewee and respondent organizations managed their SAP environments using a variety of “third-party tools and processes, and tools provided by their previous operating systems and platform vendors.”

Maintaining legacy tools carries a cost. The respondents reported that the cost “averaged out to $148,207 per year before implementing the SUSE and Intel server platform.” In fact, after implementing the SUSE and Intel platform, they experienced “an average of 16.2 percent reduction in the cost of these legacy tools”.

The Forrester study provides real insights into the benefits of the SUSE and Intel server platform

Choosing a platform for SAP S/4HANA infrastructure requires consideration of IT productivity, potential downtime, cost, and flexibility. Over time, the impact on a business needs to be considered and clearly understood. In fact, the study showed organizations stand to gain ROI of 120% by moving to the SUSE and Intel platforms.

 Read the full Forrester study to gain real insight into the return on investment organizations can achieve by deploying SAP S/4HANA on the SUSE and Intel server platform.

Download: “The Total Economic Impact^TM Of SUSE Solutions For SAP Environments Powered by Intel Technology”

The Total Economic Impact^TM Of SUSE Solutions For SAP Environments Powered by Intel Technology, August 2022

A Forrester Total Economic Impact^TM Study Commissioned By SUSE and Intel