Working with SAP and SUSE, WIIT delivers stellar customer service, boosting loyalty and growth

Aspectos destacados

  • Delivers fully supported, easy-to-use and high-performing platform
  • Decreases the number of incidents on customer systems
  • Improves customer experience, strengthening loyalty

Productos

WIIT offers platform as a service (PaaS) environments to host the critical core business applications of approximately 400 companies worldwide.

As the fastest-growing SAP cloud provider in Italy, winning more SAP customers than even larger IT providers, in 2017 WIIT decided to list itself on the Italian Stock Exchange.

At-a-Glance

Delivering top-quality private cloud services to large and medium-sized enterprises across Italy and abroad is no easy feat — especially when market conditions are tough, and customers are demanding. To help companies focus on what matters most — selling and boosting profit — cloud company WIIT deployed SAP HANA running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications. By working with SAP and SUSE, WIIT succeeded in delivering stellar customer service, which boosts loyalty and fosters growth.

El desafío

Leonardo Federighi, cloud service director at WIIT, says: “We deliver our services to customers with very large turnovers — from 100 million to 4 billion euros per year — across pretty much all industries. These companies have one crucial requirement: that their operations are up and running at all times.

“Because we are the outsourced IT department for our customers, we have a huge responsibility to ensure that their systems are constantly running smoothly, efficiently and securely. In order to keep our service quality high, we continually strive to improve our knowledge and skills, and this is reflected in the vast number of certifications and qualifications we have obtained over time. We are, in fact, one of the two cloud providers with the largest number of SAP certificates in the world!”

To give its large and demanding customers the peace of mind that their core business applications are supported by reliable, stable and secure systems, WIIT strives to stay constantly up-to-date with the latest technology.

For this reason, the company chose to adopt SAP HANA as the strategic database for its SAP-based customers. While initially choosing a mix of Microsoft Windows for application servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for databases as the operating systems for its new SAP HANA environments, WIIT soon began evaluating other options, looking for better value for money, higher performance and improved reliability.

“We were happy with Windows and Red Hat at the beginning,” says Federighi. “But we soon realized that we would significantly benefit from a more user-friendly, flexible and affordable platform.”

“What sealed the deal for us was the high-quality pre- and after-sales support that we received from SUSE: it was genuinely a whole new level of expertise and assistance and convinced us to deploy this platform.”

Solución de SUSE

In seeking a new platform for its SAP HANA environment, WIIT was impressed by SLES for SAP Applications. “The corporate synergy between SAP and SUSE is well-known,” says Federighi. “This in itself gave us great peace of mind that we were onto the right platform.

“What really sealed the deal, though, was the fantastic pre- and after-sales support that we received from SUSE: it was genuinely a whole new level of expertise and assistance and convinced us to deploy this platform.”

WIIT enlisted a SUSE business partner to provide support during the implementation process, which lasted approximately one year, and saw the development, testing and production of 200 SUSE systems, most of which were virtualized using VMware virtualization technologies.

“During the testing phase, a small issue occurred,” says Federighi. “However, the SUSE team fixed it so quickly that it didn’t impact any of our operations. This really demonstrated their skills and commitment to assisting us throughout this project.”

At present, approximately 35,000 users worldwide are leveraging WIIT’s new SAP HANA systems supported by SLES for SAP Applications.

Los resultados

By deploying SLES for SAP Applications in support of its new SAP HANA landscape, WIIT is now in a better position than ever to deliver excellent, continuous service to its customers around the world.

The SUSE platform, in support of WIIT’s SAP HANA environment, delivers enhanced reliability, stability and security, drastically slashing the number of incidents and, as a result, boosting customer service.

“Our main goal is to strengthen our customer base and win more business, and we can confidently say that the SUSE and SAP solutions are key enablers of that,” comments Federighi. “By offering an improved customer experience, we are able to boost customer loyalty and retention, and reinforce our reputation as a trusted, future-ready IT provider, which attracts new prospects.”

After the successful implementation of SLES for SAP Applications, WIIT is already planning to deploy SUSE Manager, which will help it to manage its ever-growing server environment in a simpler and more efficient way.

Federighi concludes, “The collaboration with SUSE was absolutely crucial to support our continuous growth, and our reputation as a leading private cloud service provider for business critical applications in Italy and abroad.”