The Challenge
The way technology is used is starting to change. We have noticed a distinct move away from the one stop technology shop and organisations are beginning to ‘cherry pick’ aspects of technology that work specifically for them. The challenge in this changing market is to understand how these systems can be integrated, and what the best practices are in each individual situation.
Integrating ecosystem technologies such as Hadoop into an existing SAP landscape comes with multiple challenges, specifically with the use of HANA and analytics tools for exploration of data residing in Hadoop
Our Solution
Our ability and experience to impart an understanding around the limitations and best practices with which to support SAP data landscapes led to a six-week Proof of Concept (POC) engagement with a leading food and beverage organisation. We have a proven capability around understanding limitations and best practices to support SAP data landscapes with open source scalable capability.
Our team is recognised as being able to bring niche experience and capability to integrate SAP solution and Hadoop capability to help prove value that could be added to the client’s landscape. We brought extensive Hadoop skills in both engineering/development and architecture to support a broader SAP landscape of HANA, ECC and analytics tools.
We aimed to:
- Support our client in conducting a POC, focussed on a time-boxed scope to showcase technical capability using Hadoop and related technologies.
- Provide expertise in introducing Hadoop to the client through a series of test and learn outcomes, upskilling resources in the concept and general architecture.
- Lead execution of a number of specific use cases to prove capability of an active archive and object store to support a growing SAP centric data footprint.
Identify the potential value in data and create a pathway to realising it.
Using Ignite’s methodology in a time defined scope, our Analytics Pathway delivers:
- Prioritised business analytics pipeline
- Insight into the unique needs of internal and external personas
- Grouped data and analytics requirements
- Defined data and solution architecture
- Optimised Prototype-to-Production operating model
- Executable workplan
- Comprehensive business case
Results
Our approach to this engagement was as a combination of onsite and offsite at our offices with the IT and architecture teams across three key use cases. These focussed on proving integration and use concepts across Hana data aging, document storage and retrieval and transaction archiving. Alongside this we were able to work closely with internal IT teams to lift their understanding and capability with Hadoop, while proving the concept of how Hadoop could be used to integrate into the landscape and provide scalability for growing datasets and document stores
Our team on this project consisted of our Hadoop Engineer, who was supported by our Big Data Architect, while the client contributed project management and supporting IT resources. Our team completed a six-week engagement to develop a working Hadoop environment integrated into the client’s existing SAP landscape.
Alongside this, we also delivered:
- A series of executed use cases to test out specific requirements and functionality of Hadoop and integration with SAP.
- Overall proven capability to integrate and support active archive needs for core components.
- Input to strategic transformation activities across the client’s systems and landscape.
- Working Hadoop environment with documented approaches and scripts.
- Detailed execution reports across each use case, outlining steps taken, requirement success/fail and detailed evidence.
- Overall solution architecture, learnings and recommendations.
