Symphony IT

From the percussion to the string section, an orchestra’s strength emanates from its multi-timbral wall of sound with focused solos taking center stage for key portions of the performance. With the vantage point from the podium, the conductor orchestrates the harmonic architecture and delivery timing of the performance together.

IT infrastructure should work similarly, offering temporary flurries of activities from specialist services that do only what they do best. These activities are turned on and off as required before another service takes over according to business demands.

However, the ability to improvise, change key and time signature or even tune (aka IT flex) is highly limited when running SAP workloads in an on-premises environment – just ask any parent with a child in music lessons who can only play one maddening tune, relentlessly, for months on end.

While SAP is always building more agility into its solutions, new implementations of SAP that remain on-premises will always be subject to infrastructure constraints. For example, if you need an ephemeral SAP system, like for example, a finance system you need for just a few weeks to validate a new functional update. With an on-premises SAP system, you would need to buy and set up the additional hardware to do this. This equates to needing only a string quartet for one movement of your symphony but still having to pay for the full 90 strong symphonic orchestra. In an agile cloud model full of “session musicians”, the ability to flex across compute, storage, and native cloud services as required means your ability to drive change and optimization is limited only by your functional and change management capacity.

As another example, what if you want to change your tune, Data-Centric Jazz maybe? With many organizations now recognizing data as the business vibe of the ’20s, the movement to data democracy architectures, agnostic of the application the data was created by, is increasingly more common. By escaping the traditional data silos and being able to gain pattern insights across SAP data overlaid with non-SAP, third party, procured and even meteorological data, you can more easily identify trends that influence sales, manufacturing agility, and brand adoption. Only with a modern hyperscale cloud platform can you perform classic hits and Jazz improve in the same performance with the additional assurance that, if the audience wants to hear some RnB, it’s entirely possible given the spectrum of compute, storage, AI, and machine learning “instruments” available on-demand.

In a cloud-conducted model, computer processing, storage, and networks become a shared, on-demand resource for the organization versus running on separate platforms. Operational evolution can enable developers and builders, regardless of the number of parallel compositions, the ability to request infrastructure capacity through code versus shuffling paper. And, when they’re finished the assets are simply deactivated to ensure lean financial hygiene.

Most C-Suite decision-makers are under pressure for that next multi-market platinum-selling album of cost reduction & speed to innovation improvements. Orchestrating their IT estate into an agile, near-infinitely scalable platform ensures that they can continue belting out those classical hits to cater for every business case playlist.

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