For enterprises across all industries, the digital channel is becoming a key competitive differentiator. By harnessing data-driven services, businesses are unlocking hidden operational insights, enhancing the customer experience and building compelling offerings that nurture long-term loyalty.
As a CSP, Techwave Hungary knows that performant, resilient and integrated business systems are a crucial foundation for these advanced digital capabilities. For many years, the company has specialized in helping businesses across Eastern Europe gain the benefits of SAP ERP solutions, without the need for time-consuming management and maintenance.
Gabor Lesti, CIO at Techwave Hungary Ltd., takes up the story: “Our commitment to continuous innovation has helped us become one of Eastern Europe’s leading providers of managed services for SAP applications. From our enterprise-class private cloud infrastructure, we support customers of all sizes with 24/7 access to mission-critical SAP solutions.”
At-a-Glance
Identifying an opportunity for new business growth, Techwave Hungary looked to scale out its managed services infrastructure to help customers fast-track their digital transformation. By deploying a new, high-performance platform based on IBM Power Systems servers, underpinned by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, the company launched a private cloud platform capable of running large volumes of new SAP workloads while keeping management requirements lean. Techwave Hungary now helps existing customers and new prospects augment their digital capabilities.
Die Herausforderung
Identifying appetite for analytics
With the announcement of the next-generation data warehouse solution SAP BW/4HANA and ERP SAP S/4HANA, Techwave Hungary realized that demand for the new analytics and big data insights would soon skyrocket. The company knew that existing customers would be keen to convert from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA as soon as possible, and that many prospects with on-premises SAP ERP implementations would be looking to upgrade and re-platform to the cloud.
“Real-time insight into business operations will be a game-changer for many businesses, and our goal is to support these organizations by delivering managed services for SAP BW/4HANA and ERP SAP S/4HANA to new and existing customers,” says Lesti.
Building a future-proof private cloud
To allow for a sharp increase in SAP data volumes and enable the compute, storage and networking headroom for in-memory analytics workloads, Techwave Hungary aimed to scale out its existing private cloud infrastructure, based on IBM Power Systems servers.
Lesti confirms: “By augmenting our existing IBM server platform with the latest-generation IBM POWER9-processor-based systems, we were confident we would gain the performance boost to support the demanding new requirements of SAP BW/4HANA and ERP SAP S/4HANA solutions.”
“We are committed to finding the best technology solutions to keep vital systems running smoothly 24/7, and that is exactly what we are delivering with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.”
SUSE Lösung
Selecting a proven platform
To maximize the value of its investment in the new IBM Power Systems server, the company looked for an operating system that was tightly compatible with the target SAP solutions, and robust enough to deliver 24/7 access to customers’ critical business data and applications.
After evaluating the leading solutions on the market, Techwave Hungary selected SLES for SAP Applications as the foundation for the new iteration of its private cloud platform.
“SLES for SAP Applications is SAP’s own preferred platform for SAP S/4HANA and is fully certified for the company’s next-generation solution suites,” explains Lesti. “The fact that so many leading global businesses—as well as SAP itself—trust the SUSE platform gave us the confidence that it would meet our needs for demanding in-memory workloads.”
Going to market rapidly
Working with IBM, Techwave Hungary deployed, tested and configured the new IBM server and integrated it with its existing IBM Power Systems environment. By choosing SLES for SAP Applications, the company gains the peace of mind that it can achieve high levels of reliability and availability for mission-critical SAP business systems.
“One of the best aspects of SLES for SAP Applications is how robust it is—it just runs and runs,” comments Lesti. “Unlike other operating systems we’ve used in the past, we’ve never needed to reboot SLES for SAP Applications because of a memory issue, or experienced painful downtime when applying patches.
“The fact that we can count on the SUSE platform is extremely important, because our customers depend on it to run their businesses. Thanks to SUSE, we’re now making the leading-edge capabilities of SAP S/4HANA available to organizations across Hungary.”
Die Ergebnisse
Ready for growth
Using SUSE and IBM solutions, Techwave Hungary has successfully scaled out its private cloud platform. As a result, the company is positioned to improve its already rigorous service levels for existing customers, while creating the headroom to move new and existing customers to SAP BW/4HANA and ERP SAP S/4HANA.
While Techwave Hungary’s business volumes increase, its behind-the-scenes management and maintenance requirements will stay lean and efficient thanks to integrated, automated tools in SLES for SAP Applications.
Lesti explains: “In the past, setting up an SAP environment—for example, when we onboarded a new client—required us to spend up to four hours reading through documentation to identify and set the optimal operating system configuration. Thanks to the saptune tool in SLES for SAP Applications, that’s all changed. Today, saptune allows us to instantly find the best configuration for each SAP environment, without the need for manual research.”
He adds: “As the growth of our managed services offering takes off, we anticipate we’ll have a significant number of new SAP environments to configure each month. We estimate that saptune could save us up to 1,000 person-hours each year, allowing us to keep our IT team lean and spend more of our working days on value-added customer services.”
Enabling long-term success
Looking to the future, Techwave Hungary believes it has found the ideal server platform to support its long-term growth ambitions.
“In partnership with SUSE and IBM, we have built a very resilient and scalable private cloud that will empower businesses across Hungary to unlock the game-changing analytics capabilities of SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA,” concludes Lesti. “Our promise to customers is that we are committed to finding the best technology solutions to keep their vital systems running smoothly 24/7, and that is exactly what we are delivering with SLES for SAP Applications.”