Products and services at a glance
Notes
The SAP basis as an organisational unit within a growing IT organisation is facing far-reaching changes. The growing number of technologies and the growing need for integration and collaboration with upstream and downstream IT departments means that the SAP basis is constantly growing. Examples of organisational concepts and further information can be found in chapters 7.6 and 9.4 of the Master's thesis.
SAP HANA (SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an SAP platform based on in-memory technology. With SAP HANA, you can achieve enormous performance increases over conventional databases that were previously unthinkable. This enables you to analyze and evaluate mass data almost in real time without the need for data aggregation.
Manage batch jobs
If we look at the question of standardisation, this concerns not only the administrative side of IT products, but also the standardisation and simplification of IT products offered by the SAP basis. For this purpose, tools such as ITIL for standardised tasks and the development of IT product and IT service catalogues have already established themselves to the greatest extent possible. These clearly describe the IT services provided. In addition to the definition of the service to be provided, the clear description shall include the identification of disclaimers and conditions that must exist. Also part of the service description is a price that can be composed of fixed and variable parts. This simplification and bundling of the product portfolios should also reduce the administrative burden when ordering, activating, changing, terminating and, of course, invoicing. The description of the IT services and the associated development of an IT product catalogue is the basis for standardisation, whether the recipient is an external or internal customer (e.g. a business unit). One difficulty is the definition of IT products, i.e. the pooling of IT services and resources. An orientation towards the idea of cloud computing can help. The characteristics of cloud computing are the provision of standardised services in terms of performance and type of performance, results-orientated services, provision of performance to a wide range of service customers, scalability, transaction-based billing and high risk of IT service failure.
All of the above tasks have been part of SAP Basis Administration for decades. However, SAP software has changed a lot since the introduction of HANA in 2010, and with that, the SAP system administrator's job has changed as well. Here are some of the key differences:
The "Shortcut for SAP Systems" tool is ideal for doing many tasks in the SAP basis more easily and quickly.
SAP Basis Operation manages the IT underlying the SAP system.
Some useful tips about SAP basis can be found on www.sap-corner.de.
Verify that the transport tools are working correctly with Transp Tool.