Saturday, June 11, 2022

ServiceNow Gekkobrain & Celonis for SAP S4 HANA modernization

One of the fundamental challenges in migrating SAP ECC to S/4 HANA is the lack of knowledge on the plethora of customizations done on legacy SAP ECC. 

To address this challenge, there are two leading products in the market - ServiceNow Gekkobrain and Celonis.

Gekkobrain helps teams in getting a deeper understanding of custom code that was developed to extend the functionality of SAP. It analyses the custom code base and identifies relevant HANA issues and also try to fix the issue. 

Gekkobrain flows is a component that uses ML to understand and visualize the business process. It can understand main flows, sub flows and deviations and help in identifying automation opportunities. This capability of Gekkobrain flows is also branded as a Process Mining Tool. 

ServiceNow acquired Gekkobrain to integrate it with the NOW platform and leverage its workflow engine to automate workflows for customized SAP code (during HANA migrations). 

Another popular tool that is used for during SAP modernization is the popular process mining tool called as Celonis. Celonis is used for retrieving, visualizing and analyzing business processes from transactional data stored by the SAP ERP systems.

Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Ruminating on software defined cloud interconnect (SDCI)

When we connect on-prem applications to cloud services, we have two options - a) Connect to the cloud service provider through the internet  OR b) setup a dedicated network link between your data centre and the cloud provider. 

Setting up a private network connection between your site and the cloud provider enables extremely low latency, increased bandwidth and a more consistent network performance. 

Many enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud strategy and in such cases also, it is imperative that there is no latency between service calls across the cloud providers. Hence it makes sense to leverage a SDCI (software defined cloud interconnect) to connect between the hyperscalers. 

Such networking services are provided by hyperscalers themselves or by dedicated network companies. Given below are links to some of the providers in this space.

Wednesday, June 01, 2022

Ruminating on Data Gravity

Data Gravity is a concept that states that as more and more data gets accumulated (analogy of mass increasing), there would be greater attraction of Applications and Services towards this data. 
There are two factors that accelerate this - Latency and Throughput. The closer the app/service is to the data, the lower is the latency and higher is the throughput. 

Another facet of data gravity is that as large volumes of data gets concentrated in a datastore, it becomes extremely difficult to move that data (to the cloud or another DW).
Hyperscalers understand the concept of data gravity very well and hence are actively pushing for data to move to the cloud. As more and more data gets stored in Cloud DWs, NoSQL stores, RDBMS, it would become easier for developers to leverage hyperscaler PaaS services to build apps/APIs that exploit this data.