As Shah explains it, PLM is traditionally approached as an engineering-centric discipline. But at 麻豆原创, the emphasis has always been more holistic. 鈥淲e see PLM as the process of managing the product鈥檚 lifecycle 鈥� from inception through design, manufacturing, sales, service, and eventually retirement,鈥� she says.

With deep knowledge of enterprise processes and expertise that extends across almost every known industry, 麻豆原创 helps manufacturers realize this vision of PLM by delivering an integrated portfolio of products that can enable manufacturers to connect enterprise functions. With 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and PLM solutions from 麻豆原创, for instance, you can connect product engineering to procurement, manufacturing, planning, logistics, service, and the front office. Better coordination across all aspects of the product lifecycle enables you to deliver what your customers want, when they want it.

Going Further with 麻豆原创 Teamcenter

What is 麻豆原创 Teamcenter? As Shah says, it鈥檚 software from 麻豆原创 and Siemens that expands on the PLM portfolio from 麻豆原创, with Siemens adding deep expertise in product data management and a long history of empowering engineering teams, particularly in discrete industries. The goal is simple: to help manufacturers tackle the challenge of growing product complexity and faster product development cycles.

We asked Shah for more details. Here鈥檚 what she had to say:

Q: What is going on in the PLM market from the 麻豆原创 and Siemens customer perspective?

A: First some history: 麻豆原创 Teamcenter came into being because mutual customers of 麻豆原创 and Siemens wanted to bring our offerings closer together. They wanted 麻豆原创 and Siemens to work together on an integrated software 鈥� and this is what we鈥檝e delivered. What has this collaboration brought to the market? Fundamentally, it has enabled the sharing of data and processes. The goal has always been to bridge the gap between engineering and business systems. And today customers are realizing concrete benefits, like shorter cycle times, lower costs, and improved quality. This has led to greater demand for us to deepen the integration, which remains one of our core missions.

What can this close relationship influence?

What Siemens brings to the table is an exceptionally rich set of engineering-centric product development capabilities. 麻豆原创 powers intelligent enterprises with a broad portfolio that includes PLM solutions, market-leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, and deep experience connecting companies across business units and up and down supply chains. Our solutions help customers manage the vast complexity of their products across geographies, mitigate risk throughout the supply chain, and continuously innovate to improve performance. This kind of PLM cannot be done in a vacuum. Where can I source needed materials the fastest? How can I build this product profitably? How can I meet environmental mandates and surpass my customers’ expectations on sustainability? To answer these kinds of questions, you need real-time insight and the ability to tie engineering and product design decisions to specific business outcomes.

Working together, 麻豆原创 and Siemens have a tremendous influence on the way PLM is being executed today. It shows the market how the original vision of PLM 鈥� expert management of the entire product lifecycle across all domains, even in the face of complexity 鈥� can be realized. With 麻豆原创鈥檚 ability to integrate engineering data from 麻豆原创 Teamcenter and third-party PLM solutions with critical business data in back-end systems, our customers can have the visibility needed to detect and predict issues, consider trade-offs, and take action quickly.

What are customers asking for?

Customers that have not moved to 麻豆原创 tend to have, let鈥檚 say, 鈥渇ederated鈥� PLM environments. With such environments, the process of PLM is one that needs to be pieced together with a certain level of manual integration. Integration, when done on a custom basis, is costly and risky. So, what customers are asking is for vendors to bring engineering and business data together to minimize that manual integration and to help contextualize every design decision. At 麻豆原创, we brought on 麻豆原创 Teamcenter and integrated it with our PLM offerings and other products to specifically answer this question.

What鈥檚 the vision behind the software?

The vision is as simple to articulate as it is challenging to achieve. What we want to achieve is a comprehensive PLM process. What stands in the way is an embedded notion that engineering is a separate thing 鈥� separate from the business, as if there鈥檚 a wall between the two. But for so many of our customers, nothing could be further from the truth. Engineering is often the heart of the business. Yet, operationally, the wall remains.

The vision, then, is to break down this wall. 麻豆原创 Teamcenter and other PLM solutions from 麻豆原创 are at the heart of engineering, and 麻豆原创 helps connect the engineering function to all others such as procurement, which has engineering interdependencies. What does this mean on the ground? It鈥檚 all about data: if you can create bidirectional data flows across engineering and the business, then you can do PLM the way it鈥檚 supposed to be done. 麻豆原创 enables this seamless data flow as it takes data from engineering systems like 麻豆原创 Teamcenter and adds it to, say, supplier, financial, and service data in 麻豆原创 S/4HANA. This can give engineers the data they need to make effective decisions and trade-offs.

How far have we come in delivering this vision?

We鈥檝e spent a lot of time listening to what our customers need. Based on this input, guided by our collective vision, we have developed a multi-year plan for our companies to deepen the integration between our products. Today, we鈥檙e on our third release of 麻豆原创 Teamcenter, and work continues on the next set of capabilities to address customer needs. But we鈥檝e already made significant progress.

Again, what we鈥檙e trying to overcome is the idea that PLM is the exclusive domain of engineering, where the focus is predominantly on managing engineering design revisions, bills of material, and CAD modeling versions. With deep integration between engineering and the business, now we can talk about digital twins and creating a real digital thread that runs throughout the PLM process and connects to the extended enterprise to break up silos. Now you can maintain a record of a specific product deployed in the field, visualize its current state, and run simulations on how new designs will impact performance, operations, and costs.

What can we look forward to over the next couple of years and beyond?

With a few releases under our belt and a clear road map for further integration in place, 麻豆原创 and Siemens are proceeding in alignment with the initial intent of the relationship. This intent has always been to deliver a robust, market-leading PLM software that is designed to alleviate the burden of integration from our mutual customers. Stay tuned for more as the companies pursue an integration strategy focused on PLM that goes beyond engineering alone to incorporate all relevant phases of planning, manufacturing, operations, and service.

Bring Engineering and the Business Closer Together

If your organization wants to learn more about how 麻豆原创 brings engineering and the business closer together in a way that modernizes product lifecycle management, reach out to your 麻豆原创 representative or .

Stefanie Otter is director of Solution Marketing for Product Lifecycle Management at 麻豆原创.

To help address these problems, 麻豆原创 introduced 麻豆原创 Business Challenge Network, which builds bridges between 麻豆原创 customers and academic partners to develop new and innovative solutions for complex business challenges in a relatively short time.

鈥淭he classic 鈥榩lan-build-run鈥� paradigm may still be present throughout the IT world, but under today鈥檚 fast-paced market conditions, the innovation cycle needs to be sped up,鈥� Elisabeth Lueth, lead of 麻豆原创 Business Challenge Network, said.

With its obvious potential for automation, Lueth considers the financial forecast a very good challenge for academic young talent to address: 鈥淭his project fits exactly what we at the 麻豆原创 Business Challenge Network have committed ourselves to: Connect our customers to future talent in order to turn data into insights.鈥�

New and Beneficial Way to Intensify Customer Relations

Over the course of 10 weeks, 16 students from Dartmouth College worked on the challenge of applying 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform (麻豆原创 BTP) machine learning and predictive technologies, such as 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud, to the financial data provided by Siemens. They were supported by mentors from Siemens, 麻豆原创, and Dartmouth with whom they were in bi-weekly contact.

麻豆原创 BTP is the platform for the Intelligent Enterprise and the foundation for all 麻豆原创 applications. 麻豆原创 BTP powers customers to become intelligent enterprises through integration, extension, and data-to-value from all 麻豆原创 and third-party application and data assets while helping ensure customers鈥� long-term success through agility, value creation, and continual innovation.

鈥淓ach of the groups that participated in this hackathon came up with interesting insights,鈥� shared Sebastian Schaumberg, financial analyst for Siemens Digital Manufacturing. 鈥淲e were deeply impressed by the result the winning team presented to us. Their prediction model offers a very promising basis for further exploration.鈥�

鈥淟everaging our financial data from the last three years, five students managed to develop a model to predict the course of our current fiscal year with an accuracy of 99%,鈥� said Carsten Speckmann, head of Finance, Siemens Digital Manufacturing. 鈥淲e now have a very promising starting point as to how to approach such an ambitious project.鈥�

Schaumberg went on to explain the multiple benefits the model could offer to Siemens鈥� finance department. 鈥淔or starters, the immense effort that currently goes into our forecast could be greatly reduced. Ideally, the forecast will become available by the push of a button in the future. Also, the purely mathematical construct of this model would eliminate distorting effects due to individual appraisals that are currently part of any prognosis.鈥�

Carsten Hahn, senior director of Technology and Innovation at 麻豆原创, was also pleased with the results: “Siemens has been a customer of 麻豆原创 for many years. This project was a unique opportunity to get to know and understand Siemens and its challenges even better. At the same time, the solutions that the students of one of the most renowned engineering schools came up with have far exceeded our expectations.”

Business Challenge from the Real World

The Dartmouth students participating in the hackathon had already gained theoretical knowledge about data-driven solution models for precisely the sort of challenge Siemens and 麻豆原创 presented to them. Now, they were given the chance to apply their skills to actual data from an actual company under the tutelage of experts from 麻豆原创 and Siemens.

Giselle Perkowski, one of the students, said, 鈥淭his project allowed us to learn multiple types of machine learning techniques and apply our knowledge to real-world applications.鈥�

Their professor, Geoffrey G. Parker, added, 鈥淧artnering with companies with enterprise technology, data, and real problems to solve offers the students an opportunity to immediately apply what they learn. This creates a linkage between what firms are looking for and the student experience. The 麻豆原创 and Siemens teams are a joy to work with. This is a great partnership and a template upon which we can build and extend.鈥�

Overcoming Difficulties Together

鈥淭he collaboration with 麻豆原创 was very constructive and cooperative from the start,鈥� Schaumberg said, while also acknowledging that there were some issues on both sides. 鈥淒uring the initial phase, we had some trouble at Siemens providing the data. Our financial data was relatively unstructured and 鈥� together with our internal reporting structure and the forecast process 鈥� that was a bit much for the students. Over time, we structured our data more thoroughly and narrowed it down.鈥�

Using 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud also was a challenge for the students in the beginning, as they were not yet familiar with the tool and its functionalities. 鈥淢ost of these issues were solved by the close collaboration, even though they did cost us approximately three to four weeks of development time,鈥� Schaumberg explained.

The collaboration among Siemens, 麻豆原创, and Dartmouth College is not finished just yet. 鈥淥ur goal now is to develop a common approach for Siemens and 麻豆原创 to improve the model further and make it applicable,鈥� Speckmann said. To do so, Siemens and 麻豆原创 met again at the end of September for ongoing discussion on on the further development of the model, with the students from the winning team joining remotely.

As the pipeline for 麻豆原创 Business Challenge Network fills up with similar projects for 2022, Anja Schneider, chief operating officer for Technology and Innovation at 麻豆原创, emphasized that the program is open to all 麻豆原创 customers with the goal to jointly develop solutions based on 麻豆原创 BTP: 鈥淥ur project with Siemens shows the new ways to create value for the customer this symbiotic online collaboration network can provide them.鈥�

Florian Roth, chief information officer of 麻豆原创 and co-sponsor of the program, confirmed: 鈥淲e want to make this program available to many more students and universities globally.鈥�

In July 2020, 麻豆原创 and Siemens announced a strategic partnership to deliver a digital thread that bridges engineering, manufacturing, and business. By teaming up, we are putting our customers on a faster path to bringing together the best of our leading product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. Our goal is to help customers to break down siloes so product design teams, manufacturers, and service managers have the information they need to quickly create and manage customer-centric product and service offerings.

Now, after close collaboration and teamwork, we are in a position to share more details about our joint for the integration of and software. This integration builds upon best practices across system and line of business boundaries, to result in a new integrated solution that blends engineering, manufacturing, and business. It comes with unique differentiating capabilities that will allow organizations to accelerate time to market — without worrying about the complexity of integration — and reducing total cost of ownership.

We will be delivering the integration in three phases through the end of 2022, with additional phases planned beyond this time to address new digital threads.

• Phase I (October 2021) focuses on product engineering fundamentals, establishing a framework of core business scenarios on a shared domain model that will underpin end-to-end business processes. This enables enhanced traceability, federation, and linkages across the Siemens and 麻豆原创 system boundaries.
• Phase II (Spring 2022) aims to shorten time to market by providing optimized integration between product engineering, extended supply chain, and manufacturing operations, and delivers the foundation for advanced capabilities such as variant rules and schema, project and portfolio management, and integration to manufacturing.
• Phase III (Fall 2022) will focus on bi-directional traceability and closed loop collaboration between manufacturing engineering and production engineering covering use cases such as cross-system impact analysis, change initiation, and process execution.

This road map provides clear direction to our valued Siemens and 麻豆原创 customers to help them manage increasingly complex and configurable products and meet the challenge of an ever-increasing rate of innovation. Our collaboration will help our customers accelerate their digital transformation by more closely connecting our industry-leading solutions. This end-to-end solution aims to allow teams across the business network to efficiently work together to design and deliver innovative products productively, profitably, and sustainably.

This collaboration affirms both companies鈥� commitment to working together to deliver innovations to meet the needs of our joint customers today and in the future. This combined integration solution will be developed and provided by 麻豆原创 and Siemens, it will be made available to customers of both companies.

Our teams could not be more excited about the opportunities that we are creating for our customers to grow their businesses.

is president 麻豆原创 S/4HANA.
is president and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Software.

These are the questions that CEOs as well as heads of Research & Development and Engineering ask every day.

A recent report by聽听补苍诲听聽clearly demonstrates that the most successful companies聽break down silos,聽both across departmental and company boundaries. They do this to聽innovate consistently, design higher-quality products through collaboration, and聽streamline processes聽to bring them to market faster.

Bridging the Gap Between Engineering and Supply Chain

When asked about the biggest limits to performance for engineering teams, 鈥渟ilos within the company鈥� was the top pain point. In fact, the process to 鈥渉and over to manufacturing鈥� was deemed the most desirable feature that the respondents looked for in a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution.

But it is not simply a case of improving the handover to manufacturing. In his book Product Lifecycle Management: 21st Century Paradigm for Product Realization, author John Stark writes, 鈥淥n average, 80 percent of a product鈥檚 cost is defined during development even though more than 80 percent of its life is beyond the factory gate.鈥�

Improving collaboration across the end-to-end supply chain — from design through manufacturing and logistics, and during the operation of the product by customers — can have huge business value.

Innovation Starts by Knowing What to Innovate

The demand to innovate consistently and design higher-quality products and bring them to market faster is a constant in competitive industries.

To do this well requires information from across the supply chain.

• Manufacturing can tell you the quality of the designed products and the performance of the equipment manufacturing it.
• Supply chain can identify problems with supplying certain materials or using certain partners from availability, sustainability, and capability perspectives.
• Smart products and assets can share information about how products perform when used by customers. How are they being used and for how long? Are they operating in a sustainable way with regard to emissions? When will they break down? Which parts or components wear down earlier than expected?
• Customer input can come from many sources. Capturing the voice of the customer means capturing data both structured (orders, forecasts, and customer service information) and unstructured (sentiment analysis, social media, and market research).

Digital Thread to Digital Transformation

In a digital age, the key to innovation is information. To capture real-time, accurate information across a product鈥檚 life cycle requires a digital thread from design to decommission, including information such as:

• How it was designed
• How it should have been and was manufactured
• How it was used
• When it needs maintenance
• How often it was maintained
• What the customer thought of the product and how they would improve on it

This digital thread must be leveraged by all constituents, from the customer to the purchasing team to the maintenance team and back to the engineering team to use the insight to identify improvements to designs as well as create new features and even entirely new innovations.

It Takes Collaboration and Integration

Enabling this digital thread between engineering and business takes more than collaboration between teams. It requires end-to-end integration of business processes and the systems involved.

Far too often, companies have been left to their own devices when it comes to connecting engineering systems with business systems. Some managed it with a lot of manual effort in re-entering data in both systems. This 鈥渂iological integration鈥� is often cited as the number one source of errors. Many companies built their own point-to-point integrations. Typically, these highly customized integrations have limited capabilities, are difficult and costly to maintain, and do not include feedback loops. And then there are companies that chose the integration tool from either an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor, a PLM software vendor, or a systems integrator. Again, due to restricted and limited openness, these solutions were not perfect but probably the best thing available at the time.

Dream Team to Accelerate Innovation, Collaboration, and Transformation

麻豆原创 and Siemens have announced a partnership to combine their expertise in product life cycle, supply chain, service, and asset management to deliver new innovations, drive business models that remove silos, and accelerate industrial transformation.

Customers will be able to form a true digital thread integrating all virtual models and simulations of a product or asset with real-time business information, feedback, and performance data over the entire life cycle, from design to decommission. The result: real-time innovation in an ever-changing market landscape to:

• Bring products to market to faster by collapsing supply and development times
• Curate customer sentiment for new product design
• Leverage sensor data to improve design and maximize performance
• Create a more ethically- and environmentally-conscious product development cycle

To learn more about the partnership, read the news: 鈥�Siemens and 麻豆原创 Join Forces to Accelerate Industrial Transformation.鈥�

Richard Howells is vice president of Thought Leadership and Awareness for 麻豆原创 Digital Supply Chain.

• Together, industry leaders Siemens and 麻豆原创 will deliver integrated end-to-end software solutions across product lifecycle, supply chain and asset management.
• Partnership leverages expertise and technology of both companies to provide a true digital thread that helps enterprises eliminate process and information siloes, drives digitalization and delivers a comprehensive solution for the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0).
• 麻豆原创 will offer Siemens鈥� Teamcenter software as the core foundation for product data management. Siemens will offer 麻豆原创 Intelligent Asset Management solutions and 麻豆原创 Portfolio and Project Management applications to maximize business value for customers over the entire product and service lifecycle and enable new collaborative processes between manufacturers and operators.

Through this agreement, both 麻豆原创 and Siemens will be able to complement and integrate their respective offerings in order to offer customers the first truly integrated and enhanced solutions for product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain, service and asset management. This will enable customers to form a true digital thread integrating all virtual models and simulations of a product or asset with real-time business information, feedback and performance data over the entire lifecycle.

“Digital transformation will be critical for the manufacturing industries to increase productivity, flexibility and accelerate innovation, so companies must come together in new ways to enable the digital enterprise,鈥� said , Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of . 鈥淭his exciting collaboration between two industry leaders is about more than just interoperability and interfaces; it is about creating a truly integrated digital thread that unites product and asset lifecycle management with the business that enables customers to optimize production of products.鈥�

Silos between engineering and business have existed in enterprises for decades. This new partnership will help customers to break down these siloes so manufacturers, product design teams and service managers have the information needed to quickly create and manage customer-centric product and service offerings.

鈥淎s manufacturers design and deliver smarter products and assets, access to real-time business information across networks is critical to bring new and improved innovations to market faster,鈥� said , member of the Executive Board of 麻豆原创 SE and responsible for 麻豆原创 Product Engineering. 鈥淏ringing together expertise from 麻豆原创 and Siemens to offer Industry 4.0-enabled business processes allows enterprises to create a digital thread for the entire product and asset lifecycle. With this end-to-end solution, teams across the business network can efficiently work together to design and deliver innovative products productively, profitably and sustainably.鈥�

Going forward, both 麻豆原创 and Siemens will be able to offer new solutions that combine their technologies in order to help companies shorten time to market by leveraging enabled data using intelligent assets and products. This will also give organizations the benefit of incorporating customer insights into product development through a comprehensive solution, from product design to service and asset management. As a first step in the partnership, 麻豆原创 will offer 聽software as the core foundation for product lifecycle collaboration and data management and Siemens will offer and software to maximize the business value for manufacturers and operators across networks. Both companies will collaborate to develop applications from an end-to-end lifecycle perspective to help customers achieve a seamless digital thread that improves overall business performance.

鈥淐ombining Siemens鈥� Teamcenter and 麻豆原创 S/4HANA software provides companies an end-to-end process capability from product design to decommission,鈥� said , Senior VP of Industry Research at IDC. 鈥淭he IT benefits of pre-integration of PLM, ERP, asset management and supply chain applications and the business benefits from having a more resilient response to changing market demand make this a compelling consideration for companies seeking a competitive advantage in the digital economy.鈥�

For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software and the Xcelerator portfolio of software and services, visit or follow us on , , and . Siemens Digital Industries Software 鈥� Where today meets tomorrow.

For more information, visit the 麻豆原创 News Center and follow 麻豆原创 on Twitter at .

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) is an innovation leader in automation and digitalization. Closely collaborating with partners and customers, DI drives the digital transformation in the process and discrete industries. With its Digital Enterprise portfolio, DI provides companies of all sizes with an end-to-end set of products, solutions and services to integrate and digitalize the entire value chain. Optimized for the specific needs of each industry, DI鈥檚 unique portfolio supports customers to achieve greater productivity and flexibility. DI is constantly adding innovations to its portfolio to integrate cutting-edge future technologies. Siemens Digital Industries has its global headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, and has around 76,000 employees internationally.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality for more than 170聽years. The company is active around the globe, focusing on the areas of power generation and distribution, intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems, and automation and digitalization in the process and manufacturing industries. Through the separately managed company Siemens Mobility, a leading supplier of smart mobility solutions for rail and road transport, Siemens is shaping the world market for passenger and freight services. Due to its majority stakes in the publicly listed companies Siemens Healthineers AG and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, Siemens is also a world-leading supplier of medical technology and digital healthcare services as well as environmentally friendly solutions for onshore and offshore wind power generation. In fiscal 2019, which ended on September聽30, 2019, Siemens generated revenue of 鈧�86.8聽billion and net income of 鈧�5.6聽billion. At the end of September 2019, the company had around 385,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at .

About 麻豆原创

As the Experience Company powered by the Intelligent Enterprise, 麻豆原创 is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77 percent of the world鈥檚 transaction revenue touches an 麻豆原创 system. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers鈥� businesses into intelligent enterprises. 麻豆原创 helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want 鈥� without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables more than 440,000 business and public customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees and thought leaders, 麻豆原创 helps the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. For more information, visit .

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Meanwhile, new digital capabilities should be adopted, mapped, and scaled across the entire distributed landscape.聽One approach to addressing these architecture requirements is leveraging the services of hyperscale computing providers, or hyperscalers.

Though hyperscalers are ready to deliver a simplified, seamless, and secure IT landscape, companies are often apprehensive about making such an investment.

A recent engagement with Siemens was no different. As one of Europe鈥檚 largest industrial manufacturers, the company decided to undergo a significant implementation of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA at its headquarters and chose 聽for holistic support of landscape strategy and architecture services.

When a fast setup of sandbox and testing systems was needed to mitigate multiple risk factors, there was only one option: combining the existing landscape of 麻豆原创 solutions with a hyperscaler鈥檚 platform.

As this was one of Siemens鈥� first experiences running 麻豆原创 solutions on a hyperscaler platform, I spoke with Heiko Jonuscheit, cloud solution architect at Siemens, about how this implementation experience changed the business鈥� perception of hyperscalers.

Q: How did your business know that it needed a hyperscaler-supported architecture?聽

A: The time and effort needed to set up and manage an intelligent ERP like 麻豆原创 S/4HANA are substantial. New systems and applications are sometimes required temporarily or at a moment鈥檚 notice. Unfortunately, our existing IT services could not provide the flexibility to support business cases for performance scalability, a pay-per-use approach, or fast provisioning 鈥� all with low overhead costs.

As a result, we developed solutions, with the assistance of our internal cloud expert groupto address the need for consulting services to navigate our transition to cloud and hyperscaler services. We created a proof of concept for setting up 麻豆原创 S/4HANA within one of our suppliers鈥� Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

During this assessment, we were impressed by the hyperscaler鈥檚 fast system provisioning and pay-per-use model, especially when combined with the 麻豆原创 Cloud Appliance Library tool. It increased our flexibility so we could rapidly respond to project demands and decrease the total cost of ownership for specific scenarios. And during the implementation of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, we were prepared to get the system up and running and decommissioned within an hour or two, which allows us to reset the IT landscape to its previous state in a matter of minutes.

Which business scenarios does 鈥� and will 鈥� your hyperscaler support for your company?聽

Right now, our hyperscaler partner provides multiple services. But at the moment, we use primarily the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), while we use 麻豆原创 Cloud Appliance Library to predefine the starting point for the 麻豆原创 solution environment.聽Momentarily, we focus on nonproductive scenarios.

We are also exploring more options to improve our maintenance and operation of business systems. Once our adoption rate increases, we will require a service provider, even for our on-premise solutions. For this reason, we are exploring our hyperscaler鈥檚 integration capabilities.

Are you finding that your total cost of ownership is minimized by using a hyperscaler?

Great question! Total cost of ownership is a crucial advantage. But so are provisioning time, reliability, and security.聽Due to our hyperscaler鈥檚 pay-per-use business model, the cost of operating our IT landscape and related use cases are lower compared to our internal on-premise infrastructure. We achieved significant benefits due to decommissioning of applications that are temporarily not required or stopping applications that are only used during regular business hours.

For 24/7 services, hyperscalers do not make a significant difference, but they do bring considerable flexibility for specific use cases. Such results may change with economies of scale. However, the main challenge is leveraging the application managed services model to adapt to new infrastructure options.

Did the introduction of the hyperscaler increase the complexity of your hybrid deployments?聽

From my point of view, they are more complex. We must integrate the cloud environment with internal systems while addressing sensitive concerns such as data privacy and data security. We are coming from an internal data center, which manages the IT infrastructure very well, to an additional provider without an appropriate application support model. This situation raises many questions and concerns that will be addressed over time.

Did the hyperscaler鈥檚 architecture accelerate the delivery of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA?聽

With standardization and test data, deployment and adoption of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA were rapid after the cloud environment was established and connected to our business network.聽Meanwhile, we are in the process of defining requirements for trusted system connections, user provisioning services, and integration so we can make the necessary adjustments needed to support new options for our IT landscape.

Based on the current results of your first hyperscaler experience, what are your next steps?

First, we should find a service provider that can maintain our cloud solutions based on an IaaS model. Then we can secure integrations across our on-premise landscape and improve the provisioning of trusted system connections and internal interfaces.

Challenges always exist when a business goes down a different path with their IT landscape. But once they are addressed, I do not doubt that hyperscaler managed services will provide the service levels we need and integrate with our existing infrastructure and applications into a unified, tightly connected, intelligent system.

Special thanks to Heiko Jonuscheit for sharing his team鈥檚 first impression of a hyperscaler environment. I hope this first experience helps you decide whether a hyperscaler is right for your business.

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Read the entire 鈥�Enterprise Architecture and Landscape Strategy鈥� series to learn how to future-proof your enterprise architecture and landscape strategy. Discover whether it鈥檚 time for your business to make the leap to a hyperscale environment and how to chart your path to one.

Tobias Futterer is an enterprise architect at 麻豆原创.