SAP has shelled out part of the $150 million Australian investment purse unveiled here by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in late 2014 to light up an enterprise cloud service for federal government agencies.
The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service will chase business from federal agencies which are under a ‘cloud first’ imperative to shift their digital workloads out of on-premise infrastructure.
The service is designed exclusively for SAP workloads of which there are many in Canberra, with reportedly over 50 agencies running SAP applications.
It will run inside facilities operated by Australian-owned Canberra Data Centres and its first customer is the Australian government’s Shared Services Centre – set up to provide payroll, financial processing, application hosting, integrated desktop services, technology solutions and property and facilities management. Shared Services Centre goes live in mid-June.
The HANA cloud service and the Canberra-based SAP Institute for Digital Government, a thinktank cum show room for federal, state and local government applications were first mooted when Chancellor Merkel visited Australia in November 2014. At the time SAP said it would pour $150 over five years into local infrastructure and the institute, which opened last October.
Right now, the HANA service is only capable of running government work with an ‘unclassified’ security rating, but by the end of the year should be capable of running data with a ‘protected’ rating, according to Damien Bueno, SAP Australia’s executive general manager of Public Services.
Mr Bueno said he expected three to five agencies would shift their workloads into the HANA cloud service in the next 12 months. Early adopters will likely be smaller agencies, although Mr Bueno said larger agencies could come on board later.
Before they can shift into the SAP cloud, many agencies will need to rejig their workloads to make them compatible with cloud architecture.
“There is work for agencies to do but my view is that agencies have an appetite to get through it because they understand the benefits in the medium and long term,” said Mr Bueno. “Where SAP is concerned is we are trying to make that a less disruptive process. We’ve got a global model which is the HANA Enterprise Cloud which is a repeatable and productised service for cloud infrastructure.”
SAP’s partner with the HANA cloud service is Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “HPE’s Converged Systems for SAP HANA, together with HPE Datacentre Care Services, provide a complete managed cloud environment to SAP customers, helping Australian enterprises effectively manage sophisticated SAP HANA workloads in real-time,” said Alan Hyde, VP of HPE’s South Pacific Enterprise Group, in a prepared statement.
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