Gebr. Heinemann, a major distributor, and retailer for the international travel retail market, started their journey towards SAP HANA / SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (SAP HEC) at the beginning of 2020.
Continue readingLondon, UK; Boston, MA – Basis Technologies, creators of the most complete DevOps and test automation platform engineered specifically for SAP systems, and smartShift Technologies, pioneers of automated SAP system transformation, today announced a partnership initiative that will enable SAP users to massively accelerate and de-risk SAP transformation projects, in particular migration to SAP’s latest technology platform, S/4HANA.
Organizations that employ the combination of ActiveControl, Basis Technologies’ market-leading automated SAP DevOps technology, and smartRetrofit, part of the smartShift Technologies’ Intelligent Automation methodology and tools, will benefit from fully automated ‘dual maintenance’ of ECC and S/4HANA systems – a complex, resource-intensive scenario that may last for years. This integrated, best practice approach results in faster, more cost-effective S/4HANA transitions that involve less manual effort, reduce the risk of disruption and provide full visibility to the business.
ActiveControl automates almost every aspect of the SAP change and release process – commonly reaching up to ninety-five percent – and can automatically, safely and efficiently deploy every relevant ECC change to S/4HANA systems. smartRetrofit takes the key role of automatically updating custom code to meet the technical requirements of S/4HANA while it is merged into the new systems. More than ninety percent can be remediated in this way without any end user intervention – a significant benefit given the typical cross-release dual maintenance challenge customers face.
“I’m delighted that we’re announcing this partnership between Basis Technologies and smartShift Technologies. I look forward to working together to help companies realize greater value from their investment in SAP and get to S/4HANA more quickly,” said Duncan Williamson, Chief Revenue Officer of Basis Technologies. “We continue to expand our global network of expert partners, and I’m very pleased to welcome smartShift Technologies into that family so that they can help us bring the significant benefits of SAP automation to more SAP users around the world.”
“Basis Technologies and smartShift join a common vision of bringing a DevOps mindset and automation to Enterprise IT,” said smartShift CEO Seth Henry. “With Basis Technologies we are now able to provide intelligent and complete retrofit support, especially in complex S/4HANA scenarios. Another great addition to our smartS4 solution, a simpler, safer, sooner and smarter way to modernize legacy SAP systems and run them efficiently in the cloud.”
For more information on ActiveControl and other Basis Technologies products, such as Testimony, the only automated SAP regression testing technology that doesn’t require test scripts or test maintenance, visit www.basistechnologies.com/contact.
To learn more about smartShift Technologies and smartS4, visit https://smartShifttech.com.
About Basis Technologies
At Basis Technologies we believe every company should have the freedom to change, and to unlock the full potential of SAP. That’s why we create automation software that enables continuous delivery to thrive, giving businesses the agility needed to adapt to rapidly changing priorities and market demands. We provide the only fully automated DevOps and test platform specifically engineered for use in SAP, providing many of the world’s leading brands with the means to deliver SAP change with absolute confidence and virtually no risk so that they can accelerate time to market, simplify transformation, realize value fast and create amazing business outcomes.
About smartShift Technologies
smartShift Technologies provides a smarter way to transform legacy SAP systems and run them in the cloud. Leveraging smartShift’s Intelligent Automation Platform, smartShift clients complete SAP system transformations exponentially faster and with significantly less risk. They upgrade to S/4HANA in a matter of months, minimize disruption to their business, while freeing up their limited IT resources for higher value, more strategic work. smartShift’s automation has been used to modernize over 1,000 SAP systems, analyze and convert 2B lines of code, while achieving an error rate of less than 0.1%.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries.
For more information, contact:
Christie Lindstrom
Chief Marketing Officer, Basis Technologies
christie.lindstrom@basistechnologies.com
Vyom Gupta
Media Relations, smartShift Technologies
+1.765.714.9256
vgupta@smartShifttech.com
smartShift Technologies has been awarded Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency Status, a certification that highlights our capabilities of moving enterprise workloads to the cloud. AWS is a leader in the public cloud space, and provides infrastructure as service (IaaS), platform as service (PaaS) and packaged software as service (SaaS) offerings. smartShift is proud to be an AWS Partner with multiple competencies, providing our clients with everything from initial assessments through architecture design and migration, helping them take full advantage of the cloud. By achieving AWS Migration Competency Status, smartShift has proven that it has the skills to help safely and efficiently move our customers to AWS, and that we can successfully execute all phases of complex projects.
“We are happy to add the AWS Migration Competency Status to our list of credentials. This exemplifies our ongoing 10+ year partnership commitment to AWS and our ever-expanding capabilities to bring more customers and more workloads the mutual benefits of smartShift and AWS,” said Vyom Gupta, EVP, Enterprise Cloud Solutions, smartShift Technologies. “With both our philosophies aligned around ‘customer obsession’ and ‘automation,’ we will continue to bring better, faster, and less expensive offerings to our mutual customers.”
As an AWS Advanced Partner, smartShift already holds status as an MSP Partner, Oracle Competency, and Solutions Partner. Adding the AWS Migration Competency Status confirms that smartShift is highly-capable and can expertly navigate the move to AWS. This competency status helps differentiate smartShift from the competition, and provides reassurance to customers that we have the experience and know-how to deliver a successful transition.
To achieve migration status, smartShift had to go through an in-depth audit with AWS. The audit included a rigorous review of actual customer migrations executed by smartShift. Our team had to show a level of proficiency around the completed projects, processes, and tools leveraged to make the client successful.
Our customers can rest assured that our team has a track record of proven success, and that our familiarity with AWS will not only help deliver their migration quickly and successfully, but also enable us to provide them with services and support beyond migration that will make their business more effective and efficient.
If your company is ready to work with a proven partner to migrate to AWS, contact us now to get started.
smartShift Technologies brings the power of intelligent automation to DXC Technology’s portfolio of SAP solutions and services. The partnership enables our SAP customers to gain an unparalleled, automated, end-to-end solution to safely and quickly migrate, modernize and manage SAP applications and infrastructure — a significant step toward digital transformation.
Customers embracing digital change need an innovative and agile partner that can help build and manage their digital core platform. Together, our two companies help customers migrate to S/4HANA —on premises or in a hyperscale cloud infrastructure — faster, safer and cost-effectively, without disrupting the business.
DXC Technology and smartShift Announce Agreement to Accelerate and De-risk Customers’ Path to S/4HANA
Continue readingAMAG and smartShift Technologies partner on SAP S/4HANA
Continue readingCustomer had to meet stringent new revenue recognition requirements which were unfeasible in their existing SAP landscape, only by upgrading to SAP Suite on HANA could these regulations be met.
Continue readingTo date, smartShift has completed more than a dozen conversions of ECC 6 systems to S/4HANA. One recent conversion involved a rather unique requirement around infrastructure, and we thought it would make for a good story.
Continue readingFor the past 25 years, I have been working in the area of automation. But this is not where I started my career. During my master’s program at USC, I was first introduced to artificial intelligence, a field which immediately fascinated me. At that time, jobs related to AI were far and few between, but my first job was indeed relevant: working with rule-based decision systems. Since then, the field of artificial intelligence has progressed a lot, for the most part without grabbing headlines. Only during the recent years it has captured wide attention once more, particularly the field of machine learning. It reminds me of the hype that web and “dot com” introduced in the 1990s. Bubble anyone? Only this time around, the advances in this field have provided a solid foundation to sustain machine learning expansion. My second job introduced me to the world of application and language understanding, and this is where I have been active for many years. A lot of fascinating things happened during that time, and as you will see things are now headed to where I started. The cycle is now closing.
Understanding application and their code
In the beginning, there was the mainframe. Beasts of power that could handle a tremendous number of transactions, but which came at a cost. Next, the “network was the computer” as Sun Microsystems heralded to the world. Companies now had alternatives to the mainframe monoliths.
There was a problem, however. Successful companies had invested a lot of money in creating mainframe processes that gave them the edge, and of course reams of custom code to go with it. What to do with all that custom code now? The will was strong but the code was weak, proprietary and incompatible. And we should not forget that relational databases were not yet taken for granted. Hierarchical and network database management systems were strong and, if you ask me, based on elegant concepts and very good at what they were doing. But history is (re)written by the winners, so servers and relational databases it became.
The role of automation
The word of the day was Migration. Migration away from the mainframe monoliths to the client-server. But that required a splitting of applications across layers in a way that would fit the client-server model: front-end, business and database layers. This was a tall order since the challenge was multi-level:
Clearly a disciplined approach was mandatory in order to succeed. And this is where application understanding and automation came into the picture. Application understanding may mean different things to different people, but here we will define it as a way of extracting the key attributes and features of the application. Extraction is done programmatically in a repeatable manner and stored in a repository as a meta-model of the application and its components. The attributes and features need to be carefully selected in a manner that enables smart decision making when it is time to “rewrite” the application. “Rewriting” actually means both refactoring and rearchitecting. Refactoring applies to the code, rearchitecting to the application. In our case, rearchitecting was the redistribution of the application components to best match the client-server paradigm. In most cases, breaking up monoliths meant both rearchitecting and refactoring.
The object-oriented paradigm
Most of the code we had to deal with in monolithic systems was written in procedural languages or reporting languages such as COBOL. Also common was the use of generators, mostly for code, screen definitions and database artifacts. Early refactoring was performed using C, which at the time was the lingua franca of Unix for business and database layers. For front-end coding, to some degree C++ was the best option in order to take advantage of Windows GUI capabilities.
At the dawn of the millennium, Java gained a strong foothold among developers. By now it has also become the “favorite” in enterprise development. Java was introduced to a wider developer audience and acted as a facilitator of some key aspects of programming: object oriented programming, separation of concerns, virtual machines, software packaging and interoperability.
Our use of a meta-model and a repository allowed us to build infrastructure and tools that were flexible and platform neutral. All due to our intelligent automation approach, which allowed pluggable support of source and target languages and the ability to assimilate and make best use of numerous platforms
ERP and SAP(r)
Another important trend that gained steam in the mid-1990s and has kept growing strong ever since is ERP software and platforms. For us as a company, one particularly important ERP software was and still is SAP. Our intelligent automation approach enabled us to follow its progress over the last 10-15 years, and we will continue to do so in the future. The earlier application of our automated solution addressed mostly code refactoring and had a strong focus on ABAP, the programming language of SAP ERP. We were and still are present to support SAP customers with our intelligent automation, particularly when SAP started its journey to digitalization with the support of in-memory databases, the launch of S/4 and the move to the cloud.
Closing words
The beginning of the new year is always a good opportunity to take stock, reflect and plan ahead. As you probably know by now, history repeats itself. Intelligent automation means staying alert and keeping an eye out for new opportunities. As I hinted earlier, I see the cycle now closing after all these years, especially from my perspective. I am happy to say that we are now adopting machine learning into our automation repository as a further tool to drive application understanding and open new possibilities to our tools and customers. In that sense, I would like to wish to all of you a successful start of this New Year and of whatever new chapter you are about to open. From our side, our new year’s resolution is to publish more blogs about us, our intelligent automation approach and the technologies we are using.
Niko Faradouris, Senior Technical Architect, smartShift Technologies, Mannheim
Having completed multiple SAP S/4HANA Conversions over the last two years, we identified some patterns when it comes to S/4HANA and custom code.
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