Migrating essential SAP workloads to Google Cloud requires ‘the power of many’ if you want to stay ahead of rising customer expectations and fierce competition.

The Bory Castle in historic Székesfehérvár is a fantasy-like, curious work of art, well worth exploring. What’s especially unusual is how it was built in the early 20th century. Hungarian architect and sculptor Jenő Bory created the structure as a tribute to his wife and his artistic dreams. And he did it almost single-handedly. In other words, he was the architect, the project manager, the mason, landscapere and more.

It only took him 40 summers!

There’s much to admire about self-reliance in the artistic world. Still, it’s a luxury that enterprises and their partners can rarely afford with landmark tech projects and harsh business realities. Time is critical. So are costs, mistakes, and outcomes. And suppose you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP). In that case, you also need repeatable, frictionless processes and reliable partnerships — so you can scale quickly and capitalize on lucrative opportunities.

Competitive landscape

Self-reliance sounds noble. But it could be your downfall if it becomes your mantra or creeps in by default. For example, let’s look at the increasing business opportunities around moving SAP workloads to the Google Cloud (GCP).

Migrations occur within a fiercely competitive landscape — where MSPs struggle to compete. Going it alone with an SAP migration to GCP can be a minefield. These IT environments are complex. You need expertise in SAP Basis support, SAP infrastructure, and supported combinations of operating systems, databases, and SAP tools. Then there’s the management of the multiple SAP environments – dev, test, and production – and the need to ensure these all match. It doesn’t stop there. You’ll have to manage updates within these environments and systematically create and manage highly-available systems.

Put simply, there’s almost zero margin for error from start to finish. Any delays, costs, or poor outcomes will impact your business — further eating up internal resources and throttling your ability to grow.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Collaboration at the core

Self-reliance is great for artistic one-off projects and flights of fancy. But it takes collaboration and ‘the power of many’ to successfully move to cloud platforms, especially when taking SAP workloads to GCP. At SUSE, we grew up with open-source, and we have collaboration at our core — because we know it’s key to dealing with complexity and creating transformation.

Our co-innovation partnership with SAP is a great example. For more than 20 years, we’ve developed and delivered SUSE and SAP solutions together, fine-tuning them to accommodate and enhance the other’s offerings. In fact, SAP uses SUSE solutions to create SAP HANA and for use in its production environments. For instance, this partnership developed innovations like live kernel patching, high availability, and deployment automation, to name a few. Our tools help partners to deploy SAP with minimal manual effort, manage mixed Linux estates from a single dashboard, and deliver strong SLAs that deepen their relationships with customers — so they can stand out from the crowd.

SUSE is the first partner chosen by Google to offer Committed Use Discounts with GCP for SAP environments. Most importantly, we build the SUSE images for GCP, certifying every release for SAP on GCP — which helps to eliminate risks to our partners and customers.

Power of Many

“The power of many’ may not have worked for Jenő Bory and his quirky castle, but it’s proving key to helping a wide range of partners migrate SAP customer solutions quickly and simply to Google Cloud.

Discover more about SUSE and how you can get help with migrating SAP workloads to GCP. Contact us at google@suse.com or visit https://www.suse.com/google/

(I originally published this piece on LinkedIn)