Core Competencies

IIS is a leading provider of SAP business software solutions delivered on high-availability HP hardware platforms. IIS has been an exclusive HP storage solution provider for more than 17 years. With that experience, our consultants have the knowledge to deliver software-hardware combinations tailored to meet specific business needs.

SAP software is uniquely suited for HP hardware platforms. SAP has been an HP technology partner since 1989. That long-standing relationship has resulted in an array of end-to-end hardware and software solutions that enable companies to better manage their assets, service their customers, and anticipate and capitalize on change.

As an exclusive HP Platinum-level partner, IIS builds on the HP-SAP relationship to deliver highly available, secure, and scalable HP platforms running SAP solutions. These are the same Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and business collaboration solutions that power many of the world's largest enterprises.

Design and Planning Services

As one of HP's fastest-growing enterprise-class technology providers in the country, IIS has the knowledge to identify the optimal software configurations and hardware architectures that match your specific business needs.

At the same time, IIS helps you leverage your existing IT investments. Before deployment, we provide your organization with detailed upgrade and migration plans, IT consolidation services and implementation strategies that help you avoid downtime and ensure business continuity.

Using proven HP and SAP reference architectures, IIS will help you:

• Eliminate multiple, stand-alone data silos
• Reduce database and application administration overhead
• Provide continuous backup and quick recovery
• Create a disaster-tolerant environment for data

Baseline Performance Assessment

The most common solution to application performance issues is to throw hardware at the problem. Organizations are often surprised later to learn that the additional hardware has produced only marginal improvement. At IIS we believe that a better approach is to understand the root problem, rather than simply responding to the symptoms.

Hardware may well solve the problem, but even if part of the solution is an investment in new systems and hardware, it is still important to understand the nature of your SAP environment before committing to new infrastructure investments. Otherwise, you are simply putting off addressing the root problem for another day.

IIS professionals perform a detailed study of your current infrastructure. Our data-driven performance analysis gives us insight into the root problems that degrade application performance. We measure the performance of the operating system, file system, disk subsystem and the database environment, and we analyze how all of those subsystems interact.

Through this data-driven approach, we are able to identify the specific causes of poor performance. Customers receive a complete and detailed graphical report of findings along with recommendations for performance enhancements. These recommendations range from upgrades to application tuning, to server consolidation and more.

SAP Consolidation Services

As organizations expand, as they make acquisitions or enter into mergers, they often find that their SAP environments are sprawling out of control. IIS service professionals can help you regain control and enjoy greater business agility through consolidation.

Consolidating your application servers cuts management time and cost, eases load balancing requirements, improves system and space utilization, and optimizes your ROI. To ensure the success of the consolidation project, IIS helps you identify the key business drivers that favor consolidation, while also assessing current and future capacity requirements, collaboration opportunities, and methods for boosting utilization rates.

IIS and HP IT Consolidation Solutions provide a complete, risk-free, turnkey SAP R/3 or mySAP consolidation platform. IIS service professionals analyze the business case for consolidation, and if a strong case is evident, we then design a technical solution to fit both your business and IT objectives. To control costs and leverage previous IT investments, we use existing technologies wherever possible. We also provide a business case justification for each step along the way to reduce your risk.

With SAP server consolidation, your organization will reduce IT overhead, improve application performance, increase data availability, reduce the costs associated with various licenses, and boost scalability.

Our comprehensive consolidation services help you derive maximum value from your SAP solution. In fact, SAP cites our consolidated SAP R/3 implementations as models their customers should emulate.

SAP Upgrade and Migration Services

SAP constantly adds new features and capabilities to its product line. For instance, SAP recently released two "enhancement packages" to its ERP solution. These enhancements, or upgrades, offer several benefits, such as a simplified order-to-cash process, improved access to customer and sales order information, streamlined invoices and payments, and improved visibility for accounts-receivable representatives and cash managers.

Most organizations, however, don't have in-house SAP infrastructure experts to navigate such changes, so they often put off taking advantage of upgrades, fearing a disruption to business activities. Moreover, when those without the necessary expertise attempt the upgrades on their own, they often find themselves mired in an upgrade process that is painful, complicated, and time consuming.

IIS's SAP professionals will help you take advantage of new features today, guiding you through the upgrade process. We will help you migrate all critical data, while also helping you avoid costly downtime. As part of the upgrade process, we can help you re-engineer business processes, implement complete solutions, and tie in upgrades to consolidation projects.

Another consideration is service oriented architecture (SOA). SAP has committed itself to an enterprise SOA, which will simplify the delivery and deployment of future upgrades, patches and enhancements. If SOA is in your plans, IIS will help you select an upgrade plan that embraces SOA, giving you the ability to adopt new features and capabilities as desired without disrupting the core ERP platform.

Capacity Planning Services

When planning for future needs, IIS professionals take the guesswork out of capacity planning. Since underperforming SAP applications can drastically throw off future capacity projections, our first step is to scrutinize your current environment. Our data-driven performance analysis gives us a clear understanding of how well your SAP environment is currently performing and what can be done to improve that performance.

Based on optimal performance, we then look at future capacity requirements. Our capacity planning service goes beyond simply adding new users. Predicting on users alone is fairly simple. IIS professionals, on the other hand, look at a number of variables that can influence capacity. We look at the workload, the impact of consolidation, the addition of application features, the underlying hardware and the nature of transactions.

With this data in hand, IIS then delivers a detailed, graphical capacity planning assessment. Customers receive a report that specifies various options for accommodating future capacity needs. These focus on both short-term adjustments, such as database and application tuning, and more involved efforts, such as consolidation, virtualization and future hardware purchases.

SAP Management and Monitoring Services

IIS professionals can help you manage and maintain your SAP environments by deploying and configuring sophisticated SAP management and monitoring solutions. IIS can help you deploy and configure HP BTO Smart Plug-in (SPI) for SAP, the HP Business Availability Center (BAC), and HP Operations Manager software - all of which deliver fine-grained management of SAP applications and underlying infrastructure to help you meet various SLAs.

HP BTO SPI for SAP enables you to manage your SAP IT environment from a service perspective. It works in tandem with other HP business technology optimization solutions, such as Operations Manager and Business Availability Center, to give you end-to-end control over the SAP application services that support your core business processes.

HP Operations Manager SPI for SAP provides centralized management for multiple SAP systems, regardless of version or underlying platform. Once deployed, it discovers each SAP service and maps dependencies between SAP systems, instances and processes. This monitoring solution helps you maintain high availability for your SAP business applications, ensuring that they perform as expected and stay aligned with business priorities.

Other key benefits include:

• Automatic detection, correlation and reaction to problems in your SAP environment, beyond what can be detected with CCMS
• Alarms for critical situations in your SAP environment that cannot be resolved automatically, along with guidance for the resolution
• Insight into the impact of IT problems on business processes
• Management of response-time data for SLAs
• Collection of SAP performance and resource data for real-time visualization, aggregation and reporting
• Pre-defined templates for more than 100 web-based service reports
• Monitoring of availability and performance from an end-user perspective
• Measurement of availability and end-to-end response time based on test SAP transactions

The HP Business Availability Center (BAC) solution is a business service and application management solution that monitors the health of your business services and applications from the end-user's point of view and provides message stream integration with Operations Manager.

HP BAC helps your organization manage business and operational service levels proactively, and, when problems emerge, it helps you isolate them by automating standard operational processes. BAC can also help you manage complex business transactions across heterogeneous environments and provides full monitoring of SAP transactions. HP BAC for SAP Applications complements SAP Solution Manager and SAP NetWeaver Administrator by enabling the customer to proactively measure and manage application availability and performance, as well as transports' impact.

HP BAC works in concert with HP Operations Manager Software to give you control over and visibility into complex SAP environments. HP Operations Manager software delivers a view of the health of your infrastructure, helping you to preempt anything that could have a negative impact on service.

For organizations with complex SAP environments - multiple applications to support various front- and back-office business functions - many seek to integrate their SAP systems with non-SAP applications in order to better control complex business processes. SAP's NetWeaver middleware provides the technology for that integration, but each point of integration makes it more difficult to manage service levels and monitor application performance.

HP BAC enables you to centralize the management of those integrated components, be they SAP or non-SAP in origin. HP BAC automatically detects, triages and diagnoses SAP NetWeaver applications, while providing visibility into SAP transactions across NetWeaver and R/3 backends.

Together, HP Operations Manager software and HP BAC deliver:

• Fine-grained management of various SAP applications
• Management of SAP service levels in real-time from the business process perspective
• The ability to proactively identify, diagnose and solve SAP application issues
• Consolidated management over the relationships between users, applications, and the underlying infrastructure
• Automated creation and maintenance of SAP application maps
• Management of business and application complexity caused by interdependencies of SAP and non-SAP applications

Leveraging an Established Technology Partnership

The HP-SAP partnership is one of the most enduring technology alliances. Today, HP servers host SAP installations for 20,000 customers - nearly 50 percent of all SAP installations worldwide. The HP-SAP relationship is so critical to each organization that it extends to beyond the customer base and into their own infrastructures.

HP is one of the largest SAP customers in the world. HP relies on SAP solutions for ERP and supply chain management. At the same time, SAP has turned to HP to provide and manage its hosted services infrastructure in North America.

These trusted, mission-critical solutions are what IIS skilled IT professionals deliver to our clients. We match the right HP hardware, such as Itanium servers and HP storage arrays, to the proper SAP software solutions. Delivered with HP business technology optomization and storage management software, these are the same technologies that many of the world's largest manufacturing, government, telecommunications, and financial services organizations rely on every day.

Our long track record as integration and IT experts means that our clients are up and running in the shortest time possible. From discovery to production, from testing to deployment, we work to tailor the technology to your business requirements at each step along the way.

Download: HP SAP Solution Elite (PDF, 533.28 K)

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