Red Hat solutions for SAP

From ERP and Finance to SAP Intelligence Technologies like AI/ML or IoT, or whichever SAP business solution your company is using, Red Hat can help on every stage of your journey in becoming an intelligent enterprise.

If your business depends on traditional SAP environments, the 2027 deadline for migration to SAP HANA® or SAP S/4HANA® represents a major undertaking. Those applications, as well as every new SAP application since 2005, run natively on Linux®. Since becoming the first Linux to run SAP more than 20 years ago, Red Hat has worked with SAP and its customers to champion innovation in the enterprise datacenter and beyond.

Red Hat is the only open source company for SAP HANA, that can show a clear path from the OS via automation to containerization. Unlocking the Red Hat portfolio eases the complexity of migration while putting your best future in mind by making your datacenter efficient, making hybrid IT simple, powering the intelligent edge of the network, and by enabling new business insights from big data.

Red Hat solutions are there to help you during your SAP S/4HANA journey. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, SAP certified for Integration with SAP S/4HANA, provides a robust and highly available foundation to ensure uptime and availability of business-critical systems like SAP. Features like Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA solutions for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA, Live Kernel Patching, or in-place upgrades are the foundation to achieve near-zero-downtime SAP production deployments. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions increases reliability during migration, new deployments and day-2 operations, helping customers to adopt engineering practices like Infrastructure as Code.

Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Insights provide management, proactive monitoring and automated remediation out of the box for your SAP Digital Core, making Hybrid IT simple. Included as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription, they ensure the customer landscape on Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs efficiently, with security, and stays compliant with various standards, avoiding errors and downtime with predictive analytics.

Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform allows SAP customers not only the ability to automate your SAP deployments with Red Hat supported Ansible roles for SAP but also to build and operate automation for the whole organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles for SAP to assist with remotely or locally configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system for the installation of SAP HANA or SAP NetWeaver software.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles is a collection of roles executed by Ansible to assist administrators with server configuration right after the servers have been installed. These roles are provided in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extras repository. In contrast, Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles for SAP is provided in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions subscription and can be used by Red Hat Ansible Engine and Red Hat Ansible Tower to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. 

Red Hat Integration provides capabilities for agile integration with SAP’s Digital Core for customers’ custom applications and data, enabling new ways to extend the functionality of customers’ SAP applications. It fosters sharing and reuse of services via APIs helping organizations to treat APIs as products with appropriate governance. 

Red Hat Integration solutions allow customers to manage the entire API life cycle through Red Hat 3scale from design to implementation to API retirement, including SAP. This fully functional API management platform is ranked by Gartner as a leader in this space and customers can benefit from its full-featured developer portal or a solid understanding of the API management market highlighted by a powerful vision. In addition, Red Hat 3scale API Management supports the OpenAPI specification, enabling import capabilities for all SAP Business Hub APIs. 

Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform helps to efficiently develop, build, and deploy end-to-end business processes across hybrid cloud that can scale automatically. It enables cloud-native developers with no ABAP experience to build applications and integrations using modern tools and supports digital transformation projects allowing different developer teams access to just the SAP functionality that they need to develop new SAP solutions. 

The combination of these technologies form a powerful architectural foundation, which allows customers to: 

• Decouple the “core” with API management promoting faster development for new functionalities.
• Develop new functions as microservices. 
• Run these in containers on hybrid cloud deployments.
• Connect non-SAP systems to the “core.”

Enabling data-driven innovation and intelligent processes with data orchestration and machine learning allows customers to generate higher business value from their data. Red Hat is the only provider that offers both, a Kubernetes platform and a container storage solution, deeply integrated and tuned for hybrid cloud scenarios to run SAP Data Intelligence, enabling all the benefits of SAP's AI and ML capabilities. 

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage provides agility, scalability, and portability across hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, resulting in lower IT operation costs. It completely removes any manual task for developers or data scientists to claim storage for their workloads as this will be provisioned and managed automatically, so they can focus on tasks that add value to the company. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage allows data scientists, and those who support them, to deploy and manage cloud-portable storage on demand to satisfy all the storage requirements from SAP Data Intelligence. 

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Integration solutions enable SAP customers to integrate IoT infrastructure with SAP Data Intelligence. In highly distributed environments, communication between services running on edge sites and cloud needs special consideration. Messaging capabilities of Red Hat AMQ support all communication patterns needed for edge computing use cases and can solve even the most demanding challenges. Red Hat messaging, combined with a variety of cloud-native runtimes and tools offer a powerful foundation for building "edge-native" services. 

Red Hat Decision Manager enables the Intelligent Edge by executing against streaming IoT data using relevant business rules on the gateway. It can also sort through the “noise” from unnecessary messages received from devices and reduce traffic passed to SAP Data Intelligence for further AI/ML processing.

The SAP Technical Alliance is a group of engineers in the CEE Global Partner Success team dedicated to the certification, testing, documentation, and support of SAP on Red Hat solutions. The team works to align and prioritize Red Hat’s SAP-facing work and resources to increase Red Hat’s SAP footprint and market share. 

The main part of the team is directly working out of the SAP Linux Lab (Walldorf, Germany) together with SAP and other SAP partners. There, they have the chance to build joint solutions and help on customer issues in a bigger community.

Red Hat Consulting works with organizations to architect and design the proper IT foundation to ensure critical business operations do not suffer. Red Hat Consulting engagements align to the different steps of the SAP journey: 

• Discovery. A one-day session with representatives of the customer’s relevant teams to understand the customer’s AS-IS with their SAP ecosystem. 
• Navigate. A 5 to 10 day engagement based on DevOps practices where the customer will get a clear understanding of the SAP journey to the Intelligent Enterprise for their own use cases.
• Pilot. During this phase, a detailed architecture and implementation plan is elaborated and applied to the systems identified during the Navigate phase. A test plan is also created and followed so that the pilot can be accepted by the customer.
• Integrate. The purpose of this service is to define how the workflows created in the Pilot phase can be integrated into the whole of the customer’s SAP ecosystem so that they can be used repeatedly and scaled out.
• Accelerate. In this phase, the workflows are implemented at scale so that they are completely onboarded and integrated into the SAP ecosystem.
• SAP Optimize. This phase is actually already present at the Integrate and Accelerate stage, based on the CI/CD methodologies using feedback from all the customer’s teams to ensure the SAP ecosystem performs at its best.

Red Hat SAP Technical Account Management

A Red Hat SAP Technical Account Manager (SAP TAM) collaborates with your primary TAM, who already knows about your software environment and the technologies you deploy. Your SAP TAM and primary TAM work together to optimize your use of SAP solutions on Red Hat technologies. Working with an SAP TAM provides you: 

• A single point of contact with an SAP specialist with extensive training and connection to key technical talent at Red Hat. 
• Life-cycle planning so you can take advantage of the latest enhancements in new and upcoming products. 
• An internal advocate to promote your needs and interests within Red Hat’s engineering and product management teams.
• Early beta access to impact future product direction and support in the testing and validation process.
• Partnership with SAP and other key technology vendors to ensure your multivendor solutions are successful.