Built to Evolve: The Kinetic Enterprise

Our clients are recognizing the need to evolve to stay competitive in the market. To achieve the evolving business needs, our clients will have to continue to transform & make their enterprise intelligent. Organizations are turning to SAP S/4HANA, AI, IoT, and Cloud technologies to make their enterprise intelligent & evolving – like a kinetic enterprise – one that embraces change and even prepares for it.

These enterprises are responsive, intelligent, clean, and inclusive. For them, waiting is not an option.

How do we see IT responding? Organizations are turning to emerging technologies like AI and IoT – automation that’s fueling data-driven intelligent enterprise applications with SAP S/4HANA, SAP Leonardo, and even non-SAP applications.

While organizations aspire to become a kinetic enterprise and reap the rewards, getting there takes time, investment, and risk, all of which may impact business.

First – IT needs to identify if their current data centers can support transformative use cases and workloads powered with SAP S/4HANA including workflows and data integrations with non-SAP applications.

That’s where hybrid cloud becomes critical; it is responsive to business needs as they evolve. To enable a kinetic enterprise, IT needs a scalable on-demand platform that brings together networking, storage, and compute, so organizations can dynamically manage their IT resources. Modularity includes providing a single interface – one that simplifies and streamlines deployment and management of disruptive technologies in multi-cloud operating models.

According to IDC, more than 70% of companies are using multiple cloud environments, and the most significant data center challenge many companies face is developing a successful multi-cloud strategy.

Our customers agree: Cloud is not a destination, it’s an operating model.

Second – next generation applications and data management platforms powered with SAP HANA need to be deployed & managed with minimal business impact. Moving from legacy SAP ERP applications can be complex and often involves migrations and upgrades, defining and implementing new use cases, and integrating applications from edge to core to cloud.

To address these challenges, Dell Technologies, Intel & Deloitte are collaborating to address deployment, migration & operations of enterprise applications in the right cloud environment, bringing experienced resources across IT domains.  This may be a private cloud that is fully under the company’s control, a hybrid cloud that provides the appropriate resources across on-premises and public cloud, or extension to the edge.

Imagine if you could …

◈ Use Dell Technologies solutions for a unified operational experience across public cloud providers, on-premises, and the edge, enabling true hybrid cloud allowing you to deploy applications and data in the right cloud – a private cloud fully under your control, or a hybrid cloud that provides the resources across multiple locations.

◈ Benefit from Deloitte Cloud Managed Services to deploy multi-cloud by giving you single point of contact, and a single engagement model, as well as transformation services for SAP S/4HANA.

◈ Deliver processes and data workflow integration with non-SAP applications using the Dell Boomi platform.

The Deloitte and Dell Technologies collaboration strives to enable a kinetic enterprise running SAP. Intel endorses this as an example of their strategic intent – evidenced by the recent announcement with SAP to supercharge SAP applications.

Empowering the kinetic enterprise helps ease the transition to SAP S/4HANA. Deloitte’s experience in SAP S/4HANA industry-specific solutions combined with Dell Technologies’ digital transformation knowledge and technology can help create a flexible and scalable data management platform. Furthermore, Dell Boomi enables businesses to integrate workflows and transfer data between SAP and non-SAP applications.

Additionally, CIOs and their management teams can take advantage of a simple consumption model that offers a single point of contact and a single engagement model to accelerate their path to SAP S/4HANA on a hybrid multi-cloud. This can help reduce risk in migrations, applications can be made transient, and customization requirements are reduced for an agile, kinetic IT environment.

Deloitte and Dell Technologies are working together to help clients transform, migrate, and operate their businesses by deploying SAP S/4HANA on a dynamic multi-cloud operating model, that allows organizations to enhance, integrate & operate applications and business process. Dell Technologies and Deloitte are proud to help our customers evolve to the Kinetic Enterprise running SAP – only then will they be able to truly Reimagine Everything… Anywhere.

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Enterprise Integration Platform Enables Mission-Critical Cross-Sell Visibility on Day One

Bringing Dell and EMC together for one of the biggest IT mergers in history means extensive integration efforts that will span many months. But the key challenge our team faced even before the merger was complete, was one of the critical business process integrations leading to the launch of Dell Technologies in the marketplace.

We were charged with integrating EMC and Dell’s dual Saleforce.com systems to provide thousands of sales professionals seamless access to data and opportunities across both companies on Day One of our groundbreaking merger. We wanted our sales teams from each company to be able to sell products from both as we officially launched Dell Technologies.

What’s more, bridging the gap between the disparate Salesforce systems was needed to avoid the error-prone inefficiencies of sales reps, account managers, and finance professionals manually reconciling and reporting on data from disconnected systems.

Round peg, square hole

Both companies had different architecture and application programming interface (API) practices in their separate instances of Saleforce.com. Their product data heirarchy was laid out differently. The business process around leads, opportunities and accounts creation was customized for the needs of the respective companies. Melding them into a single set of information that enabled the cross-selling of the many complementary products across storage, server, virtualization and PC was a challenge right out of the gate.

With data format, app and cultural differences, at times it felt like our three-member Enterprise Integration Services team was trying to put a round peg into a square hole. Adding to the challenge was the fact that we had to make the integration happen in six to eight weeks.

We needed an enterprise integration platform that would be intuitive, simple to use, fast and scale to our needs. One that had built-in connectors to bridge applications so we wouldn’t have to write custom code to connect data elements.

We had an integration cloud platform that had proven effective in uniting applications and data in the more than half a dozen acquisitions that Dell had completed before its merger with EMC—Dell Boomi.  Boomi is a multi-tenant, cloud-based application integration platform that has a broad range of built-in connectors to more easily integrate applications and data in IT environments. It serves as a connection between applications whether they are on-premises or off and then manages the integrations in the cloud.

Our previous integrations were nowhere near the scale of the Dell EMC Salesforce.com project. We set the goal of designing the system to handle 5x the expected volume. With 200,000 messages a day as the baseline, we laid out the architecture that was able to support a million messages a day.

We worked with the business to assimilate the data, review business rules, establish use cases and test the consolidated data sets. Ultimately, with weeks of preparation and a two-day move into the integrated platform, our sales teams were able to function as a united force on Day One. The Salesforce.com integration was a huge success!

Building a Connected Business: Lessons learned in the Salesforce integration

If your organization is facing a business integration or merger, here are some strategies we learned along the way that might make the process a bit easier:

◈ Use an iPaaS solution—An Integration Platform as a Service, like Boomi, provides a comprehensive solution for moving, managing and governing information across data applications and data repositories.

◈ Set up a change control process—As with any project, tracking and documenting change management is essential.

◈ Tap subject matter experts (SMEs)–It is extremely important to utilize the knowledge of those on both sides of your integration effort who understand specifics of the business processes and the use cases you are dealing with—for instance, the Quote Creation Process and how it interfaces with SFDC. Guidance from SMEs and the actual end users i.e. sales reps in this case, will save your team the time it takes to get to learn the different processes and avoid costly mistakes.

◈ Clarify legal restrictions up-front—Since our team began working with both companies’ Salesforce systems before the merger was legally completed, we were uncertain what data and tools were accessible and shareable between both sides at what point in time. However, we did discover in post-merger discussions that there we had more access than we thought. It is worthwhile to have discussions with your legal team ahead of time to clarify what is restricted and what is not– to avoid being overly restrictive on data and tool access.

◈ Clean up your data—Integrating data in your iPaaS project is an opportune time for data owners on both sides to clean up their data. Make sure that the content and applications that are being moved into a unified platform are only those that are needed. Working with clean data will make the process faster and more efficient.

Finally, if your organization is facing the challenges and complexities of an iPaaS project to integrate systems, data and applications—most likely complicated by different corporate cultures—take heart. We found that most people—from managers to individual contributors—did their best to help make this collaboration a success despite the hurdles we faced. It can be done!

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