Lemongrass, a software-enabled services provider synonymous with SAP on cloud, has significantly enhanced its Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) with new multi-cloud, data management and DevOps capabilities, making SAP automation more extensible on the leading cloud platforms and enabling users to operate with greater agility while minimizing costs.
“It’s clear that automation will continue to replace manual effort in the management of SAP on cloud,” Eamonn O’Neill, Lemongrass co-founder, director and CTO, tells ERP Today. “This will quickly result in SAP feeling more ‘cloudy’ and provide a much more resilient, agile and secure landscape, allowing customers to adopt change more quickly and with more confidence.”
Lemongrass helps some of the world’s largest and most complex users of SAP migrate and operate mission-critical SAP workloads on the hyperscale cloud. It offers cloud-focused services, including end-to-end support for the entire customer lifecycle spanning planning, discovery, migration, operation, automation, innovation and data analytics. As a result, over 750,000 SAP users across the leading cloud platforms leverage LCP daily.
The latest enhancements include: optimized support for multi-cloud across hyperscale platforms AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, SAP on cloud abstraction and simplification with easy-to-use UI, eliminated downtime with cloud management, orchestration across DevOps and ITSM tools and integration to cloud-native data lake technologies.
Commenting on the new value for Lemongrass customers, O’Neill says: “Our job is to digitalize the operation of SAP on cloud and help customers take advantage of innovation from the hyperscalers. What that means is that all of the setup, maintenance and management of SAP should be as simple as possible – through a friendly UI and with tight control of a customer’s QMS.
“Additionally, we need to make SAP integration easier and we do that by exposing SAP APIs to cloud-native integration. That way, treating SAP like any other service is much easier when orchestrating cross-application business processes.
“With our latest updates in LCP, we modeled all of the aspects of running SAP on Cloud to deliver these outcomes for customers. We will continue to filter the huge innovation stream from the hyerpscalers and identify which items our customers should consider adopting next.”
The LCP Minimized Downtime Operations (MDO) revolutionizes the customer experience for running SAP in the cloud. Applying the concept of an immutable SAP platform, LCP MDO includes zero-downtime resizing, immutable zero-downtime OS patching, near zero-downtime DB patching, near zero-downtime system refresh, integration to ServiceNow and integration to DevOps toolchains.
“We are seeing a lot of interest in our MDO solution – nearly all of our customers that we talk to about LCP MDO want to adopt it. We also see a pattern in enterprises that already have a cloud footprint – they are working to build a bridge between CloudOps and their SAP team to harmonize the ways of working. With LCP, we create a common approach to allow SAP experts to build and execute DevOps automation aligned to the standards of the CloudOps team,” O’Neill tells us.
“We have refactored our LCP around the latest DevOps models to maximize the flexibility and application of automation for our customers running SAP on Cloud. For example, with LCP’s patent-pending Minimized Downtime Operations (MDO) solution, we can treat the SAP technical layer as immutable, allowing for near-zero disruption to SAP Users when updating to new OS, DB and SAP Kernel versions or moving to new-gen compute or storage solutions from the hyerpscalers.
“This kind of capability is not only new for SAP customers; it has real tangible benefits by collapsing time needed for planned downtime and constantly improving the unplanned downtime outcomes.”
