Your Easiest Decision in 2021

Happy New Year IBM Power Customer!

It’s 2021, a post-pandemic (fingers crossed) year. January is a good time to revisit decisions made last year and projects that were postponed. Perhaps you will decide to move forward with implementation of SAP HANA, so you can finally compete strategically in today’s business environment with a database that accelerates real-time, data-driven decisions. Congratulations, that is a big step! Now you have to decide on a Linux OS, lucky for you, it is going to be the easiest decision you have to make in 2021.

Have you seen those Capital One ads that talk about the “easiest decision ever”, featuring celebs like Taylor Swift and Charles Barkley? It’s just like that. 😀 Why you say? Let me count the reasons.

#1 – 99% Market Share Says It All

I’m not going to do the reverse count down, instead, let’s go straight to the biggie right off the bat.

IBM Power is actually a true power platform for SAP HANA, with over 25% of market share. And within this segment of the market, guess how many of these projects deploy SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications? Try 99% Let’s just try to visualize 99% market share. I did an extensive google search, looking for an analogy that brings the concept home and really didn’t find any, it’s hard to find any player in any industry with that kind of market share! The closest I came to was in the smart phone market – if you add up Google Android and Apple, that gets you to 99%.

So, our reason #1 really is – why would you go with anyone else? That’s just like saying I’m going to buy a smart phone in 2021, but no I don’t want Apple or Android. Um, why, just… why?

#2 – Performance, Reliability, Uptime – Proven solution

SAP is always mission critical, it’s perhaps the most mission critical application in your organizations. So more than any other app, I’m sure you’ll care a lot about SAP’s performance, reliability, uptime. You want a proven enterprise solution that delivers the best in all these characteristics. Well look no further. In fact, SUSE Linux for SAP is so rock solid and dependable, SAP itself standardizes on SUSE for the development of its own products.

#3 – SUSE Leads with Innovation

As the largest independent open source software vendor, SUSE is always first to innovate, first to push the envelope on new features, first to cross the line with certifications. Case in point, in the latest IBM Power release – Virtual PMem is one of the key new features. With this feature customers can achieve fast restart of a workload – whether for planned downtime or unplanned outage without compromising ongoing performance during normal use. To this date, SUSE is still the only OS that supports this feature. Other vendors, well, still not supporting it, meaning they are almost 2 years behind the 8-Ball.

#4 – Thousands of Customers Can’t be Wrong

We mentioned 99% earlier. Well how many customers is that? Is it just the big boys deploying SAP HANA on SUSE for IBM Power? Try 3000. Since introducing the solution in late 2015, that’s an amazing growth trajectory for the winning combination of SAP + IBM Power + SUSE. Organizations large and small have moved forward with this trio, and have seen great success, you can find their stories both on suse.com and ibm.com.

#5 – More than 2 Decades of Extensive Partnership

The 3-way collaboration across IBM, SUSE and SAP go back many years. We have a deep engineering relationship that speaks to the dedication to customers, performance and engineering excellence that permeates all 3 company’s cultures. In 2020, even amidst this crazy pandemic, we have continued our regular working relationship – striving to provide the best product, and the best support.

In summary, going with SAP HANA in 2021? Then go with SUSE for your OS solution. It truly is the easiest decision ever. And best of luck with all your digital transformation efforts in this new year!