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Industry: Technology
Location: France
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oXya

Highlights

  • Increased availability for hosted SAP environments
  • Decreased costs for operating system licenses and support
  • Delivered TCO savings of up to 80 percent

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By migrating customers from UNIX and other Linux distributions to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, oXya has enabled them to achieve higher levels of availability for critically important business systems while reducing OS and support costs. The SUSE operating system is validated for clustered environments by SAP itself, enabling oXya’s customers to choose the solution with confidence.

Overview

oXya is a highly specialized systems integrator and managed services provider for SAP ERP solutions. The company serves midsize and global organizations, helping them to increase the efficiency and flexibility of their SAP infrastructure and support operations. Valued by customers for its deep technical know-how, oXya is currently growing at around 20 percent each year.

The Challenge

New technologies and increasing globalization have contributed to greater speed of change in business. Fresh competitors emerge, and existing competitors bring new products and services to market faster than ever before. These factors are driving companies to increase their agility—and in IT terms, this often means moving key business systems to a platform run by a managed services provider (MSP).

“For at least ten years we have seen a clear tendency towards hosted applications,” said François Détrez, CTO and co-founder of oXya. “The high-availability managed services we provide for SAP enable our customers to adapt and grow their businesses faster and at lower cost.”

oXya's business success depends on its ability to offer a highly available, flexible, high-performance platform that is also easy and cost-effective to manage. For customers choosing a Linux-based hosted environment for their SAP systems, oXya needed improved support and better clustering capabilities.

“Adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as our preferred platform for clustered SAP environments solved the reliability challenges we had been experiencing.”

SUSE Solution

oXya had already introduced Linux-based servers to host a group of customers that wanted to save on hardware and software costs by migrating from commercial UNIX distributions running on vendor-specific hardware. For these customers, the total cost savings were very compelling, at between 50 and 80 percent.

To address perceived issues around vendor support and clustering capabilities, oXya chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as its preferred Linux distribution. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the only Linux distribution that is certified for clustered SAP environments, giving our customers an enterprise-class option for high availability,” said François Détrez.

“We can also see the benefits of the close commercial and technical relationship between SAP and SUSE. When a customer is looking to migrate from UNIX, we recommend a clustered solution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”

oXya now has eight major customers running their SAP applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, across approximately 100 servers—both physical and virtual. “We don’t force a particular architecture on our customers,” said François Détrez.

“Their choice is partly based on the database they want to run: of course, choosing SQL Server means choosing Windows, but for DB2 and Oracle they can choose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to reduce their OS costs without compromising on quality. And for Sybase, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the only option.”

The oXya customers that are now using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server were migrated from a number of different platforms, including IBM AIX and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In all cases, the primary goals were to achieve better availability and resilience at a financially viable price. “SAP cluster support was the key reason for selecting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, and we have certainly seen improved availability for the clients we have migrated,” said François Détrez.

The Results

With a number of major customers now running clustered SAP systems on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, oXya today has a proven solution for companies looking to migrate their SAP systems from closed and costly UNIX distributions. The SUSE operating system is compatible with all of the major database platforms supported by SAP, so it is also an accessible choice for new customers of oXya.

“Adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as our preferred platform for clustered SAP environments solved the systemavailability challenges we had been experiencing,” said François Détrez. “The SUSE operating system offers excellent availability and security for business-critical SAP implementations and a number of useful tools to simplify administration.”

SAP develops all of its software on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server first and runs its own ERP systems on the same platform, which provides a further level of confidence to oXya’s customers. “The fact that SAP develops and runs its software on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a benefit for us when it comes to marketing the platform to our own customers,” said François Détrez. “We are very happy with the technical support that SUSE provides, and we also use their services to support those of our customers using other distributions of Linux.”