Gartner’s 2015 CIO Agenda shows that CIOs face high levels of uncertainty in 2015, with distinct regional differences in the actual challenges faced.
The one constant, though, is what the research house calls “the unstoppable advancement of digitalisation”. Barnstone’s innovative “try before you buy” SAP Hana offering has been carefully designed to help CIOs explore the benefits of an important new digital technology before committing budget to it.
The offer will allow companies a two-month trial period to “road test” Barnstone’s SAP Hana-as-a-service offering for free, excluding the costs of data conversion. The process of conversion will follow a highly accelerated methodology that will see potential clients testing a particular use cases, for example. typical month end process reporting. To ensure quick turnarounds certain technical and data caps have been placed to facilitate faster return on investments.
“IT budgets remain under pressure but the demands on IT to enable the business continue to grow, creating huge uncertainty for CIOs. In response, Barnstone has developed a way to de-risk the adoption of what we think is a game-changer in a company’s ability to turn huge volumes of data into business insight and competitive advantage,” says Riaz Hamiid HANA business development executive at Barnstone.
“Not only will the offering help customers test the solution before investing, but it also provides the platform for seamless scaling into the full HANA product set.”
SAP Hana (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) uses in-memory technology to handle high transaction rates and complex query processing on the same platform. It allows large volumes of disparate data to be processed rapidly.
The technology can also be used to improve existing business processes dramatically—for example, using SAP Simple Finance, a typical month end can be reduced from five days to one or two.
The trial offer makes use of Barnstone’s existing offering of SAP Hana environment, which is hosted on an infrastructure platform provided by iSphere Technologies, a supplier of enterprise-grade, secure hosting.
iSphere’s hosting centres are located in Teraco data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. iSphere specialises in companies with niche requirements that are located in remote areas where connectivity is an issue. Barnstone client data is stored in a virtualised environment fully protected by encryption. Barnstone’s own solution templates are stored in the same environment.
Barnstone can help clients design and implement the data migration, either on a consulting or turnkey basis. The trial can be run using live data or as a simulation using a finite data set.
Hamiid says that the trial offer provides a great opportunity for firms to test what the impact of SAP Hana would be on their processes and environments, and to experiment with the technology. It also offers developers or development teams within corporates the opportunity to play with the new technology.
“SAP is an investment in a company’s success, and we believe that the in-memory technology offers a way to leverage that investment still further in the Data Age,” says Hamiid. “At the same time, we recognise that CIOs would
appreciate the chance to test-drive the solution before they commit significant budget to it. Barnstone’s ‘try before you buy’ offering is designed to do just that for SAP Hana.”