I had the pleasure of taking part in the first-ever global “SAP-certified in DevOps” program together with a team of 20 SAP experts from Tieto. We are now celebrating becoming an SAP DevOps certified partner for our customers.
In front of the famous rolling stone in SAP headquarters, Walldorf (from left): Amit Chaturvedi, Martin Dedeke (auditor), Auli Peltola, Wolfgang Weinmann (auditor) and Rahul Kumar.
The purpose of the certification program was to audit Tieto's capabilities to design, implement and run DevOps way of working in SAP. I want to express my special thanks to UPM allowing us to run the certification on their SAP cloud platform, which Tieto is developing and managing.
Why is DevOps in SAP topical now?
The DevOps way of working has been used in companies for quite a long time, with tangible results. Consequently, many companies are now trying to extend the approach to ERP Systems.
Digital transformation, S/4HANA, multi-cloud adoptions, digital disruption, technology upgrade, and support patches among others collectively put positive pressure on businesses to innovate and deliver business needs & values faster with improved affordability.
Conventional SAP development cycle has focused on keeping production stable but it is relatively slow and today's business demands agility. There is also a high risk of outages and downtimes associated with development projects. To address the ever-increasing necessity of continuous delivery adoption in the SAP ecosystem – DevOps for SAP is the answer and an accepted evolution of current SAP ALM.
What does SAP-certified in DevOps mean in practice?
I believe DevOps adoption in SAP ecosystems has several advantages.
- Faster time-to-value for development changes leading to enhanced business value
- The ability to deliver SAP releases more frequently to the businesses to help cope up with varying market demands
- Automated testing and quality checks reduce the number of fixes, justifies QA process, decreases expensive rework, and increase user satisfaction.
- Savings in SAP change management budget can lead to more investments in SAP innovation plans
- Fewer production issues considerably reduce risk, costs & sudden downtimes.
- DevOps for SAP helps bring together both innovation and stability
SAP ALM and development using Agile and DevOps methods
Tieto is now an SAP DevOps certified partner with proven capabilities to automate the entire SAP cloud development process. We can help companies reach their targets with SAP DevOps way of working, pipeline and toolchain. In practice, going for DevOps means actions like:
- Management commitment to drive change towards DevOps way of working via training investments, tooling, and automation.
- Educating teams with demos and workshops on DevOps benefits, culture, methodologies and principles
- Development strategy alignments with DevOps methods
- Selection of Agile and DevOps tools
- Technical assistance to Architects
The final target is that DevOps implementation supports each team member in handling every part of development: frontend or backend along with operations including all tools or technologies.
DevOps has come to the SAP world to stay. At the Sapphire 2019 event, Hasso Plattner, a co-founder of the SAP company, stated that all SAP development will focus on Cloud First solutions with rapid development cycles. This means that customers' capabilities to have daily releases instead of traditional monthly or quarterly releases will increase fast.
Now is a good time to explore and onboard the DevOps way of working also in SAP.
Over the past five years, Tieto has embarked on a journey to certify as many of our SAP-based portfolio services as possible. To learn more, read my blog post about how Tieto was the first in the Nordics to achieve the certification for SAP Applications Operations for S/4HANA.
Tiia helps customers to run their businesses efficiently with SAP and to become agile enterprises using real-time data and insights with the latest SAP technologies. Tiia is passionate about business-driven transformations where customers simplify their business processes and modernize their IT architectures to better serve end customers. Tiia has extensive experience in advising clients as well as leading businesses with 25+ years of experience in consulting business. Currently, she leads Tietoevry’s SAP business in Finland with global capabilities.