DevOps for SAP
Gone are the days of monolithic software applications that used to bring equal joy and grief to business with their isolated technology and heavy maintenance overheads. Today's application landscape looks very different to the rigid IT application landscape of two decades ago. IT applications have evolved to become multi-tiered, modular, flexible and easy-to-integrate. It is essential for today's applications to integrate flexibly with other applications such that the user derives the synergy from the system, rather than disparate applications causing more manual work and hassle than the individual application brings. Today's users are demanding and expect technology at their finger tips, no matter what your business. Whether you are trading in toys or alcohol, fashion or automobiles, electronics or entertainment, your customers expect you to provide them with access to your business 24 hours a day, seven days a week regardless of where they are or what device they are using. Needless to say, this is not an option - business that cannot adapt and stay on the forefront of technology will eventually fail.
It hence follows that software development methodologies must equally change, that they should be able to adapt to the demands of business and be able to provide technology quicker, more efficently and with high quality. DevOps practices advocated by modern software engineering principles, are the best way businesses can shorten the software development lifecycles whilst delivering the features and functionality that align with business goals without compromising on quality. DevOps advocates working with cross-functional teams so that software development teams can stay closely aligned to business objectives from early on in the cycle. Automation is a key cornerstone of DevOps. The way of working changes from poorly connected teams with a clear lack of ownership to a collaborative multi-skilled team who understands the goals clearly and systematically makes progress to achieve it.
Easier said than done. Whilst businesses want to achieve this, most businesses discover that they can make the move to DevOps with relative ease as far as their inhouse software development for smaller applications is concerned. However when it comes to the applications central to their business, their mission critical SAP systems, the move to DevOps becomes trickier. The challenges centre around the ability to control the change management process and the visibility into SAP environments.
Organisations struggle to bring continuous improvement to SAP environments. This leaves the business exposed to the risk of either not having continuous improvement in mission critical applications which could leave them on the back foot, or even worse, having software in production that hasn't necessarily gone through the required quality checks.
ActiveControl delivers a fundamentally new approach to change and release with automation that enables companies to adopt DevOps and Continuous Delivery. Built specifically for SAP, this technology is becoming the industry standard for companies looking to deliver change with less effort, low risk, and in a fraction of the time. It empowers business to automate the software development lifecycle, workflow and approvals, enable continuous processes, which in turn reduce risk and errors, increase quality and reduce time to deployment. Active Control eliminates the challenges to DevOps for SAP by streamlining the entire change management process, with complete visibility into SAP environments, more efficient workflows, and the flexibility to make changes on demand as priorities change. With ActiveControl you can break the shackles of regular release cycles and deploy new functionality as soon as it is ready.