Achieving Business Agility in an ERP-Driven World

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1 Achieving Business Agility in an ERP-Driven World Continuous Delivery for SAP Jason Bloomberg President, Intellyx

2 Executive Summary For large enterprises, digital transformation means far more than deploying digital technologies. It means adopting change as a core competency. For organizations that rely upon SAP for their mission-critical processes, bringing SAP into the modern, digital world presents a difficult challenge but it s a challenge that the proper automation strategy can overcome. Taking legacy application assets like SAP into the rapid, dynamic digital world presents a particular challenge for the software development organization. Automation is essential in this context as well, as it facilitates modern, agile shift-left testing for SAPcentric digital priorities. CA Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP enables organizations that depend upon SAP to bring this venerable, but inflexible application into the modern, DevOps area, where rapid deployment of software is the price of admission for competitive advantage in today s turbulent digital world. 2

3 Digital Transformation: Change as Core Competency Complicating such transformation are existing technology assets, as well as processes and organizational structures. Such legacy can become a boat anchor, holding established enterprises back, while nimbler competitors put them out of business. Digital transformation is top-of-mind in every C-suite for every enterprise around the globe, but executives are focusing too much on the digital and not enough on the transformation. In reality, digital transformation represents ongoing, systemic business transformation change that doesn t lead to some kind of digitally transformed state, but rather requires organizations to adopt change as a core competency. The good news: Existing IT assets can support enterprise transformation initiatives. Even older systems and applications can participate in our postmodern digital age, with proper management and augmentation. Such never-ending, accelerating change requires both business agility and business velocity. Enterprises must respond quickly and efficiently to change, and leverage it for competitive advantage the definition of business agility. And they must do so fast. In this ebook, we ll take a look at one of the most critical applications in any enterprise: enterprise resource planning in particular from SAP, the market leader. Such ERP applications have become the systems of record for most large organizations, and the information in them will continue to drive the business for years to come. No one would argue, however, with the fact that they have become a boat anchor as well, slowing down the very organizations they serve. This challenge is not mere inconvenience. Business agility and velocity are absolutely essential to competitive advantage, and essential to the survival of the organization. In other words, adapt your ERP for the digital era or risk extinction. 3

4 SAP: Agility From a Bygone Era In 1970, five ex-ibmers from Germany founded the System Analysis and Program Development (SAP) company. In the mid-1990s, SAP moved the current product, R/3, from the mainframe to a client/server architecture. And while the company added a service-oriented architecture with the addition of NetWeaver in the 2000s, the core product architecture remains client/server with a centralized database at its core. In 1973, they launched their first commercial mainframe-based software product for payroll, accounting and other business tasks. SAP s core innovation was that it stored data in a database instead of punch cards and was thus a real-time system for the day. As the product matured and the company added additional functionality, the common database provided SAP with centralized data across various core business processes in the enterprise. The result: a nascent enterprise resource planning marketplace with SAP as the undisputed leader, bringing together common data across increasingly complex enterprise environments. Compared to the closed, isolated products that ERP replaced, SAP s integrated approach offered unparalleled business agility

5 Today, this legacy architecture presents more limitations than advantages for the modern, digital enterprise. SAP is essentially an on-premises offering, and while the company does provide various cloud-based options, there s no question the product is a poor fit for the cloud. Furthermore, there is a downside to SAP s level of maturity: its complexity. Not only has the core ERP product grown over the years, but the company has also made dozens of acquisitions over the last two decades. Each acquisition adds to the complexity of SAP s core code base. SAP is also inherently inflexible and notoriously difficult to customize. Given its essentially monolithic structure, it s best to treat the application as a single piece of legacy software, rather than attempting the modern approach of treating enterprise software as a set of modular components with APIs. There s no question, however, that for those enterprises dependent upon SAP, it is absolutely mission-critical. Entire companies run on SAP. Replacing it with some modern, cloudnative, microservices-based alternative is little more than a pipe dream for such organizations for better or worse. 5

6 Attempting to maintain slow, legacy assets while simultaneously driving rapid, agile software approaches is a risky proposition. The Modern Software Development Lifecycle in the Context of SAP Enterprises seeking the business velocity and agility that digital transformation requires, but who are nevertheless depending upon SAP to run their businesses, are facing an impedance mismatch. SAP drives core business processes to be sure, but remains too slow and inflexible. In contrast, modern enterprise software development efforts are turning a page. Laborious, paperwork-laden waterfall approaches are giving way to fast, agile techniques for building better, customerfocused software. Added to these practices is DevOps, a cultural and organizational transformation that brings different teams together to deliver quality software at velocity. Attempting to maintain slow, legacy assets while simultaneously driving rapid, agile software approaches, however, is a risky proposition. Instead, digital-savvy executives are increasingly realizing that legacy assets even SAP must join the digital effort as full-fledged participants. 6

7 The keystone of any such effort to bring an application like SAP into the modern software development lifecycle context is how the development organization handles quality. Whereas waterfall approaches relegate testing to a separate phase after development, all modern software approaches shift testing to the left; that is, to the beginning of each development iteration. In this modern context, testing becomes proactive, as test plans represent customer requirements for each iteration. Depending upon the specific approach of the development team, then, work for each iteration or even each day is never complete until it passes all such tests. The secret to bringing SAP into this world of shift-left testing is to drive increased agility through automation. Expecting to change the functionality of SAP itself to meet the dynamic needs of the digital era is typically a fool s errand. Automating interactions with SAP, however, opens up the door to the increased velocity and agility that today s enterprises require. Such automation brings fast, new technologies and approaches to slow, legacy assets by leveraging processes and interactions in SAP, while adding new or updated processes and interactions as needed. In other words, automation enables ERP to drive agile, digital organizations in the context of the continuous delivery model of DevOps. 7

8 CA Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP CA Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP enables organizations that depend upon SAP for mission-critical operations to create agile data environments for development and testing. Remember, SAP depends upon a centralized database architecture an architecture that can make testing difficult. We address this challenge by enabling the optimization of the SAP application delivery process and automating and accelerating SAP system copies giving modern development teams a safe, secure sandbox of production-like data for testing and development purposes. Raw production data, however, is not suitable as-is for testing, because it typically includes personal information or sensitive financial data. To meet this need, we provide test data provisioning and masking. Once the testing team has access to its test data, our platform then automates test case executions an essential element of the rapid, shift-left testing that agile approaches require. As a result, CA Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP typically reduces the duration of the development cycle by up to 50 percent. Application teams are thus able to perform more frequent tests with better data, supporting rapid innovation while increasing quality in production. Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP typically reduces the duration of the development cycle by up to 50 percent. 8

9 The DevOps and agile communities have many automation tools at their disposal, as automation is a core enabler of DevOps. Such tools, however, generally do not work well with complex, legacy applications like SAP. By contrast, CA Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP provides centralized control and access management, enterprise-grade high availability, and enterprise-class scalability across a wide variety of application types, including many legacy applications with older interfaces. Within this heterogeneous context, we enable companies to optimize SAP system processing and integrate SAP with third-party systems. The benefits of such automation are dramatic. Automating within a single platform removes latency between steps in even the most complex processes, while eliminating manual operator error and delivering faster and more reliable processing, which is essential to incorporating SAP or any other legacy application in modern software efforts that drive business agility and velocity. One large European customer, for example, is now able to create test environments at the click of a button in minutes, instead of the weeks it used to take. With this additional speed, the company is now able to iterate more effectively, thus moving toward a more agile software development environment. 9

10 End-to-End Automation and Digital Transformation The CA story extends well beyond the automation of SAP testing, of course. Our deep expertise automating a range of both legacy and modern applications enables us to support a wide variety of enterprise digital transformation challenges. CA has one foot solidly in enterprise legacy environments and the other in modern agile software development approaches that support digital transformation efforts. The automation that the CA Automic One Automation Platform brings to the table is the glue that brings old and new together offering the agility and velocity to those parts of the enterprise that have hitherto resisted change. Remember, digital transformation doesn t mean shifting to some static vision of a digital business. In reality, digital transformation means adopting change as a core competency in spite of whatever legacy boat anchors threaten to slow the organization down. Automation enables established organizations to achieve the business agility required to compete with the latest crop of cloud-only, Web-scale companies and win. 10

11 Author, in partnership with CA Automation Solutions (formerly Automic): Jason Bloomberg: Jason Bloomberg is the leading industry analyst and globally recognized expert on agile digital transformation. He writes and speaks on how today s disruptive enterprise technology trends support the digital professional s business transformation goals. For more information or product demonstration please visit ca.com/automation CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2018 Intellyx LLC. CA Technologies is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this ebook All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. CS _0318