Raising Awareness for SAP on i

Jon Paris and Susan Gantner have an interesting post on the IBM Systems Magazine Web site about the “willful ignorance” many people display about installing SAP on i. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this conversation and it’s a growing awareness in our community that yes, SAP is easier to install, maintain, and run if installed on an IBM i system.

Although I don’t run SAP on i myself, here are some of things I’m hearing from others who have experience with the product about the advanatages of an SAP on i installation.

• No separate database integration issues because the IBM i database is already integrated with the operating system and the hardware. No need to worry about redundant databases if your database solution breaks.
• Far fewer servers needed (and associated server and user licenses) than with other platforms
• Easier to install. One business partner I know claims you can get a development environment up in a day on an IBM i partition.
• Fewer services needed because you are dealing with a less complicated environment (of course, this could be one of the reasons people don’t push SAP on i more…less con$ulting dollar$…Jon and Susan also allude to this in their article)
• An impressive record of being a solid ERP environment for all kinds of companies with all kinds of software. The IBM i was made for this environment.

These are the items I keep hearing about. If you know of any other SAP on i selling points, feel free to shoot them over to me.

Because of these advantages and more, I’m seeing increased awareness and dare I say it, even activism on running SAP on IBM i. Here’s just a smattering of resources and IBM i-based articles I’ve run across in the last few weeks starting to tout IBM i as a superior platform for SAP.

• Jon and Susan’s iDevelop article on SAP for i
• IBM White paper on running SAP on IBM i
• An IBM case study showing how Pentair saved money by converting its SAP environment from Intel to IBM i
• Several discussion groups popping up all over, including one in the IBM i group
  and one in the IBM i professionals group IBM i professionals group . These groups are doing a pretty good job of hashing out why SAP is better on IBM i (membership required)

I think that Jon and Susan are definitely on the right track here, and I encourage others to pick up the cause. If the IBM i community has a legitimate claim to being the most efficient, least expensive, most reliable platform for running SAP, then we should push IBM to tell more people.

Nice article, Jon and Susan.

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