The importance of warm, soft facts in selecting an SAP S/4HANA transition partner

[HPE_Alliances]

Guest blogger:  Vaibhav Rastogi 

Everyone seems to put the emphasis on cold hard facts in making their case to become your SAP S/4HANA transition partner.  Speeds, latency, storage, capacity and many more specifications come flying your way in the hopes that they will seal the deal.  But in choosing someone to help implement your most mission critical application – the one that you’ll be relying on to make the most important financial and business decisions - warm, soft facts can be just as telling and decisive.

We’ll be discussing the importance of both soft and hard facts, plus the best ways to transform your SAP Experience in an edge-to-cloud world at SAP TechED 2020. We invite you to join us. Details at the end of this blog. 

Why a softer approach?    

Hard is great if you are purchasing new hardware. While there are some differences among the various vendors, these transactions are now mostly commodity-based with decisions coming down to who can offer the lowest price.

But making the transition to SAP S/4HANA involves and impacts the entire enterprise. Here, the decision should be made on who has your best interest in mind. This is where you should be looking for a vendor that has a proven history of:

• Establishing a strong, positive overall relationship with the customer
• Displaying a sense of responsibility for the customer and their enterprise
• Listening closely to the customer to identify their needs, goals and realities
• Putting the customer first by working closely with them to provide solutions that are agnostic when it comes to vendors
• Showing an on-going commitment to ensuring optimum performance

Basically, our soft approach means that we are looking to provide you with a solution that makes more of a positive difference in your sales figures on an on-going basis, than it does on our quarter-end report.

Now for the hard sell

Here are a few cold hard facts that are a bit different but essential in a SAP S/4HANA situation:

• For 30 years, HPE and SAP have shared a collaborative partnership. That means we have a proven ability to work together to create the best possible solutions and make them available to you. The many, many benchmarks we have achieved over the years are proof positive that SAP runs best on HPE.  
• HPE and SAP share 25,000 joint customers worldwide. They appreciate both the soft and hard facts and benefits that come with working with HPE

• Approximately 40% of SAP HANA deployments are on HPE systems. In a marketplace with many competitors, the preference for HPE speaks volumes about how impressed customers are with our offers. You can learn more by accessing a complimentary copy from HPE of Gartner’s research report titled “How to Select Your Optimal SAP HANA Systems Vendor” here

We are currently offering a 7^th generation infrastructure with scalability that fully supports your real-time decision-making. See our latest benchmark for additional cold, hard facts that clearly show why our hardware complements our “soft” qualities in making HPE your vendor of choice in your drive to accelerate your journey to SAP S/4 HANA. 

We will be providing you with more details on many of these areas at SAP TechED 2020 with expert, on-demand sessions, a roundtable discusson and more.  Here's a list of the on-demand sessions available:

• Learn how HPE Storage tackles SAP Environments - YouTube
• Cloud Options for your Mission Critical SAP Workloads powered by HPE GreenLake - YouTube
• Enabling SAP Innovation in a European framework - YouTube
• Accelerate your journey to SAP S/4HANA with Mission Critical Compute Solutions from HPE
• Proceed with your SAP Transformation into a Hybrid IT during uncertain times - YouTube

The virtual event is being held from December 8 - 10.  You can get complete information and register here.   

Vaibhav Rastogi is a Principal Product Manager responsible for the roadmap and product strategy for Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s market leading mission-critical solutions for SAP HANA. He is passionate about helping clients solve some of the most complex and challenging problems by building the industry’s most scalable, resilient, performance optimized infrastructure solutions portfolio for mission-critical SAP HANA use cases.