At the recent SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas the theme from end-users was the same. From C-level executives and directors to everyday technology professionals, we heard the following concerns voiced again and again:
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- Quality of experience is a huge issue when it comes to managing the latency of my organization’s SAP applications.
- I need to guarantee business continuity at all times.
- I need to ensure my SAP Applications are secure.
To be sure, the major challenge derives from the fact that SAP applications serve as mission critical infrastructure for the mainstream business processes that most end users touch throughout their day. SAP applications are designed to provide advanced business functionality to help organizations efficiently meet their business goals. Any SAP deployment counts on network and server infrastructure performance and availability as well as the ability to protect the deployment from malicious network and application attacks. In addition, SAP deployment is also dependent upon the ability to scale and support multiple applications and types of users, and all of this while being cost effective as well.
Over the course of three days, my colleagues and I spoke directly to these core concerns while presenting the Radware FastView for SAP solution more than 150 times. In this three part series, I’ll address the three biggest challenges associated with creating and maintaining an optimized, secure and cost efficient SAP environment.
First up, I address the challenge of accelerating application performance to enhance quality of experience (QoE):
While huge efforts are often invested in integrating SAP applications into an organization’s existing business processes, it’s often the case that the performance challenges appear only well after the application is in production. Even if the application was optimally configured, latency could be sourced back to network infrastructure congestion or even poor traffic prioritization between applications sharing the same network resources.
But when it comes to a new deployment, social engineering is the hardest part. QoE is the key to employee morale and productivity. Changing the user community’s routine is difficult to begin with. But asking them to adapt to a slow application can be downright disruptive and certainly reduce productivity until the adaptation process is complete.
“How can we overcome this challenge?” was the question attendees asked of us. The answer? A solution certified by SAP for performance optimization functions.
The Radware Alteon application switch is an advanced application delivery controller (ADC) and is the only ADC tested and certified by SAP labs to provide significant performance improvements to SAP application deployments. The Alteon application switch accelerates the application response time, thereby providing a significant increase in QoE. Just imagine SAP users at branch offices in remote locations around the Globe having download times from their SAP applications that rival the response time of a well-tuned local network. Eyes would pop when we said that we could demonstrate 200X faster document load times with the Radware Alteon!