ORLANDO, Fla. Sapphire Now– May 15, 2017 – Cisco today announced that global IT organizations and service providers such as CenturyLink, Valley Proteins, and Mohawk Industries, are selecting Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS®) and SAP HANA to streamline operations and optimize profitability.  Cisco and SAP are also working to optimize the SAP-UCS customer experience with unique features for smoother manageability and better return-on-investment (ROI), resulting in an industry leading position.  

A recently released independent IDC customer survey* of 300 survey respondents currently using SAP or planning to in the next 24 months, found that Cisco® UCS is the leading platform for SAP HANA deployments, as well as the leading storage infrastructure vendor for SAP HANA, with 20.4 percent vendor share in both categories.

 “As the IDC independent customer survey results show, the combination of SAP HANA on Cisco UCS offers our enterprise customers powerful business applications, analytics, and ERP,” said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s Computing Systems Group.  “UCS is also the ideal platform for SAP service providers that offer SAP HANA-as-a-Service, and we are working with customers to easily transition their SAP deployments to hybrid clouds.”

Cisco’s innovations in SAP-HANA are a key component of Cisco’s overall Data Center vision, the  ASAP Data CenterASAP Data Center, which stands for analyze-simplify-automate-protect.  Cisco ASAP Data Center will help customers reduce cost, drive agility and accelerate business readiness. 

CenturyLink

CenturyLink, Inc., headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, is a global communications and IT services company that offers network and data systems management, big data analytics, managed security services, hosting, cloud, and IT consulting services. CenturyLink offers SAP managed cloud solutions, based on Cisco UCS.

“Our collaboration with Cisco and SAP brings a new dynamic to customers using SAP: converged infrastructure with complete automation for SAP HANA Services that is both highly intuitive and secure,” said Gary Gauba, president, Advanced Solutions Group in CenturyLink’s IT & Managed Services business unit. “CenturyLink’s deep SAP expertise, combined with Cisco’s policy-driven automation and application-centric infrastructure, helps ensure our customers advance their digital transformation projects and improve how they analyze and monetize their data.” 

Mohawk Industries

Mohawk Industries, based in Georgia and starting as a carpet mill in 1875, is the world’s largest flooring company, providing both residential and commercial flooring.  The company recognized that SAP HANA was key to providing real-time, actionable information with in-memory analytics capabilities. Working with Cisco, Dell EMC, and VMware, Mohawk implemented a state-of-the-art hybrid cloud environment based on Vblock Systems converged infrastructure technology for simple management and the power to get the most out of SAP HANA.

“With SAP HANA, we’re bringing market data, machine data, and ERP system-based transactional data to one database so that all departments can get the information that they need instantly,” said Jevin Jensen, Vice President of Global Infrastructure.  “Vblock consolidates everything into a reliable preconfigured, pretested environment, and Cisco UCS is a key part of bringing our environment to life. We can run thousands of applications, including ERP, warehouse management, finance, and SAP HANA, without compromising performance.”

Valley Proteins

Valley Proteins provides recycling services for the collection, rendering and recycling of animal processing and supermarket waste throughout the contiguous United States.  To gain a holistic view of customer profitability, supplier pricing and individual factory performance, Valley Proteins centralized data from 25 remote locations to better understand the profitability of each customer and track materials and maintenance in real-time.   Valley Proteins turned to Cisco UCS and SAP solutions to improve overall profitability and business insight, including real-time tracking of vehicles and materials and growth with modular scalability.

 “With Cisco UCS, we have a solid infrastructure for SAP, enabling greater business insight than we've ever had before,” said Brad Wilton, Director of IT, Valley Proteins.

Additional Resources

Read: Mohawk UCS Case Study

Read:  Siam City Cement UCS Case Study

Read: Valley Proteins UCS Case Study

View:  Best in Class SAP Automation with Cisco Data Center Video

View:  CUBE Conversation:  Cisco, SAP, and CenturyLink Interview on SAP HANA

View:  CUBE Conversation:  Interview with Margaret Anderson, SVP, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud

Visit:  Cisco Booth #722 at Sapphire Now

Learn more about: Cisco UCS and SAP HANA

Learn more about: Cisco UCS

Learn more about: Cisco Data Center and Virtualization

About Cisco Services for the ASAP Data Center

• Technology experts from Cisco and certified Partners help customers achieve a streamlined Hybrid IT operational model for infrastructure, applications and IT services though Advisory, Implementation, Optimization and Technical Services.
• Cisco’s comprehensive portfolio of Data Center Services offer IT consultancy and technical guidance across all stages of your digital transformation journey, to help you adopt cloud technology, drive innovation and deliver increased business value. With the right mix of automation, real-time analytics, and application economics, Cisco Services help customers integrate traditional IT, cloud infrastructure and software into an ASAP framework that reduces cost, drives agility and accelerates time to market.

About Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®)

Generic servers run generic businesses but digital transformation demands more: it requires critical applications to be delivered with industry-leading performance, availability, and security. Cisco created a revolutionary computing architecture designed for IT innovation and business acceleration. Cisco UCS isn’t just a server, it’s a radically simplified solution for advanced application performance, increased operational velocity, and superior economics.

UCS customers tell us that UCS has helped them:

· Reduce administration and management costs by up to 66 percent

· Reduce total cost of ownership at the platform, site, and organizational levels by up to 48 percent

· Accelerate the delivery of new application services by up to 83 percent

Cisco UCS. It’s not a server. It’s a system. ™

* IDC #US42198216 2016, December 2016

About Cisco

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