Responding to
customer demand
in real time
Axians helps customers achieve real-time, inmemory computing for agile business decisions
with SAP HANA powered by Cisco® technology.
“Combining our expertise with Cisco infrastructure, we can
drive new innovations for our customers.”
- Vladimir Mlynar, CTO, Axians ICT Austria GmbH
In the competitive world of online retail, stores need to capture visitors’ attention
quickly. That means powerful analytics that provide real-time market insights.
Challenges
• Empower customers with access to real-time
insights
• Build powerful infrastructure that improves
performance and scales quickly
Axians provides a complete range of ICT (information and communications
technology) services, including managed services and cloud hosting, to
customers in 15 countries. With the release of the powerful SAP HANA
platform, which transforms SAP applications with in-memory computing,
Axians saw an opportunity to help customers accelerate core processes with
real-time reporting and big data analytics.
“Offering SAP HANA speaks to our ability to bring innovation and new business
value to our customers,” says Vladimir Mlynar, chief technical officer (CTO) at
Axians ICT Austria. “But first we needed to enable SAP HANA with technology
that was powerful and scalable enough to meet the demands of a new business.”
As a Cisco partner, Axians found an excellent match for SAP HANA in the
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) architecture, balancing
high performance with simplified management that makes serving new
customers easy.
Case Study | Axians ICT Austria
Size: 400 Employees
Location: Global
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Industry: IT Services
1
Cisco UCS servers and networking solutions
help Axians grow and maintain customer
environments.
• Powered SAP HANA with the Cisco UCS platform
connected by Cisco networking solutions
Solutions
• Used service policy templates in Cisco UCS
Manager to support growing business
Adapting business in real time
20%
EFFICIENCY
GAIN
REPORTS
IN SECONDS
For Austrian online retailer neckermann.at, the ability
to put the right product in front of customers at the
right time is important to increasing sales. Many
factors, including past purchases, trends, and even
the weather, can affect what customers buy.
Axians saw an opportunity to increase business agility by migrating the company’s
SAP applications to the SAP HANA platform. With the high-density computing
power of the Cisco UCS architecture, the SAP HANA platform runs at top speeds.
This allows neckermann.at to run complex reports that pull data from multiple
channels in just seconds, giving decision makers real-time information to optimize
product placement.
“We are very pleased with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, as well
as with the hosting services of our partner Axians ICT,” said Thomas Theofilu,
director of IT and Business Organization for neckermann.at. “We can grow the
business and provide customers with a great shopping experience.”
Fast scalability
With simplified cabling, the Cisco UCS architecture makes expanding capacity
as simple as plugging in a new server. Service policy templates in Cisco UCS
Manager allow IT staff to quickly configure servers or add new virtual machines
in minutes. “Using Cisco UCS, we spend much less time on deployment,”
says Mlynar. “It gives us the flexibility to add capacity or customers as needed,
providing better customer experiences while dramatically reducing our
operating expenses.”
Reliable performance
The simplified IT landscape allows Cisco UCS to decrease latency for optimum
performance. High availability minimizes downtime, keeping customers, such
as neckermann.at, running reports when they need them.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
2
• Reduced time for customers to generate reports
from minutes to seconds
Results
• Increased system management efficiencies
by 20 percent and reduced downtime for
maintenance activity
• Reduced operating expenses with fast
deployment from hours to minutes
Looking to the future of SAP
With more companies moving towards big data, SAP HANA is expected to
power all future SAP applications. “Combining our expertise in SAP applications
with the power of Cisco UCS infrastructure, we can optimize performance and
provide customers with access to the latest SAP features,” says Mlynar.
Products & Services
Data Center
• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade servers
• Cisco UCS C-Series Rackservers
Routing and Switching
• Cisco Nexus® 5500 Series Switches
• Cisco Catalyst® 4500 Series
Switches
• Cisco Aggregation Services Routers
Fabric Interconnects
• Cisco UCS 6296 Fabric
Interconnect
Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems, Inc.
San Jose, CA
Network Management
• Cisco UCS Manager
Applications
• SAP Business Suite on HANA
• SAP Business Data Warehouse
OS
• SUSE Linux
Storage
• IBM SVC, V7000
Asia Pacific Headquarters
Cisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.
Singapore
Europe Headquarters
Cisco Systems International BV Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL:
www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship
between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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