I can't believe it's already been a year since the release of Avantra 23 in 2022. Over the past year, we've released three minor releases, 23.1, 23.2 & 23.3 that brought meaningful quality of life improvements across the entire product. We are bringing new checks, new performance optimizations, and highly requested features from our ideas portal (login needed). Additionally, there will be two new editions (Automation & Observability) so that customers can make better use of the features we have, and we have squashed 100s of bugs in different scenarios that our customers encounter in their day to day.
RISE with SAP bundles transformation services, ERP software, partner expertise guides, and business analytics to facilitate cloud migration for ERP processes and data. It lets users follow a clean core strategy for ERP optimization and innovate their business processes on a larger scale. Businesses can also enjoy real time data viewing and AI backed user interactions. The no and low code development tools further reduce operational and maintenance costs, allowing swift business process customization.
My last thoughts on this blog were published some two and a half years ago, and the topic of RISE with SAP and where it best fits has evolved over time. By now, SAP RISE is familiar to the SAP marketplace and has become more understood and recognized – though how SAP markets the solution leaves some subtle and important details unclear.
Picture the SAP Kernel as the heartbeat of the system, vitalizing the core programs upon which the fundamental functionality of SAP applications rely on. It's the life force pulsing through the application server, executable programs, database, and operating system, rather than merely encompassing them within itself. SAP Kernel upgrades refer to updating the system's current executables with upgraded versions. These upgrades are essential to patch security vulnerabilities and fix bugs. Besides bug fixing, SAP Kernel upgrades improve hardware compatibility, boost speed, and enhance stability.
Managecore is a managed service provider (MSP) offering solutions ranging from data center transformation and public cloud services to virtualization and IT managed services. The company wanted to ensure operational transparency for its clients. In doing so, Managecore planned to improve customer service by making it easier for clients to monitor their SAP environments and get real time alerts. Avantra, an automation platform for SAP and non SAP environments, stepped in with its AIOps platform to offer a multitenancy solution to Managecore. Besides automation, Avantra provided a real time SAP monitoring solution.
E-3 Magazine, in the June 2023 issue, featured a cover story about Avantra and the collaboration with our customer Nagarro. Reason enough to let the mind wander a bit and write a little more about this exceptionally good collaboration. It all started in 2013, back when CIBER Managed Services GmbH and our solution was not yet called Avantra, but Xandria. From the initial product presentation in Freiburg im Breisgau, my hometown, it was easy to see how well the attendees understood the solution, and from the questions and answers, it became clear how well we, at Avantra, knew the problems of a fast growing managed services business.
With around 130 employees, Innflow, one of the leading SAP consulting companies in Switzerland, implemented the Avantra AIOps platform for its private cloud infrastructure, three and a half years ago. Initially, the aim was to monitor its customers' SAP systems more precisely. After deploying Avantra, the SAP Basis team at Innflow quickly gained better control over the status of all customer systems and recorded significant quality improvements, as Felix Hausheer, Team Lead SAP Basis, confirms.
Time is precious and not for sale. Or is it? UMB AG, a leading Swiss IT service and managed services provider, takes the opposite view. Under the company motto "Creating Time", UMB provides its customers with more time which they use for their core business instead of IT administration. A core UMB service is complete support for SAP landscapes, be it on premise, in the UMB data centers or in the cloud. Here, UMB has relied on the artificial intelligence of the Avantra AIOps platform for a good five years in order to manage both its own SAP systems and its customers' as efficiently as possible.