DIMENSION DATA NOW A SAP-CERTIFIED PROVIDER OF CLOUD AND HOSTING SERVICES FOR SAP® SOLUTIONS; STANDARDISES CLOUD SERVER IMAGES FOR DEPLOYMENT OF SAP SOLUTIONS

New Pre-configured Images Enable Rapid Deployment of SAP Software on Dimension Data’s Cloud Platform

Kuala Lumpur, 19 May 2014 – Dimension Data, the USD 6 billion global ICT solutions and services provider, today announced it is now a SAP-certified global provider of cloud and hosting services for SAP® solutions. Dimension Data also released a set of pre-configured cloud server images that makes it easy, safe and cost-effective to provision an environment of SAP solutions. With Dimension Data’s cloud server images for the SAP ERP application available for its cloud clients, users can, in most cases, have a new cloud server operational on Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform (MCP) within 30 minutes.

Dimension Data offers integrated, enterprise-class cloud services that enable businesses to leverage the flexibility of the cloud for both temporary and mission-critical data centre workloads, such as enterprise applications and production web applications. Dimension Data’s hosting and cloud services have been certified by SAP for meeting high-quality operational standards to deliver SAP software, including the SAP ERP, SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Product Lifecycle Management and SAP Supplier Relationship Management applications and SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence solutions. This certification applies to Dimension Data’s MCPs globally for the next two years.

Dimension Data clients can host their own environments running SAP solutions on Dimension Data’s cloud infrastructure or utilise Dimension Data’s cloud server images for SAP ERP. These consist of a set of standardised builds involving the SAP enhancement package 7 for SAP ERP 6.0, Microsoft Windows® 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server® 2012 that can be deployed in minutes onto a virtual machine in the Dimension Data Cloud.  

Dimension Data’s public cloud and managed hosting environments enable clients and partners to develop, test and customise SAP applications quickly while reducing upfront capital expenses (capex)  and ongoing operating expenses (opex), delivering the benefits of mobility, flexibility and scalability for local and global SAP solution-based environments. Dimension Data supports the full data centre lifecycle of both mission-critical applications such as SAP ERP and temporary workloads. Its cloud capability enables clients to reduce the time it takes to make changes to their implementation of SAP applications, helping improve their agility to meet strict business timelines while reducing risk and increasing uptime.

Dimension Data’s cloud services leverage the company’s deep data centre and networking expertise and high-performance global cloud platform.  For enterprise clients and SAP’s ecosystem partners, Dimension Data’s combination of systems integration and cloud capability helps ease the transition of SAP applications from traditional data centres to a cloud environment.

“Our enterprise clients and provider partners can benefit from the right size, right scale and right time characteristics of the cloud to deliver significant cost savings and efficiency gains for their cloud-based SAP applications coupled with our experience in optimising the data centre,” said Steve Nola, Group Executive of Dimension Data’s IT-as-a-Service Business Unit. “SAP is the world's leading provider of enterprise software and services, and the certification of our cloud and hosting services is a vital part of our global strategy to enable clients to offload their SAP applications in production environments and temporary workloads.”

As an SAP global partner and SAP-certified provider of hosting and cloud services, Dimension Data will provide a cost-effective delivery model for mission-critical SAP applications. To achieve this certification from SAP, Dimension Data’s infrastructure, physical and logical security measures, processes, portal, and technical staff went through extensive review by SAP to validate the operational integration of its support of SAP applications to help ensure compliance with SAP's requirements for quality, availability and security. As an SAP-certified provider of cloud and hosting services for SAP solutions, Dimension Data can perform a range of IT services related to SAP applications, from initial proof-of-concepts to rapid deployments for customers of their SAP solutions.

To further ensure ongoing high standards for the management of SAP solutions, SAP-certified providers of cloud and hosting services for SAP solutions undergo a rigorous assessment of their delivery and support capabilities every two years by SAP’s outsourcing partner certification group.

Today, Dimension Data’s cloud services can be accessed globally via MCPs in San Jose, Calif., and Ashburn, Va., U.S.; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Sydney and Melbourne, Australia; Johannesburg, South Africa; London, UK; Tokyo, Japan; and Hong Kong.

In addition to the newly released images for the SAP enhancement package, Dimension Data provides users with an online service catalogue of pre-configured commercial software as an operating system (OS) image that incurs additional charges when deployed as a server. This software can be software installed on the OS image or it can be part of the OS image itself. Dimension Data cloud software is priced hourly or monthly and provides the same pay-for-use flexibility of using cloud servers and cloud files.

Dimension Data has pre-built accelerators for small-, medium- and large-scale cloud deployments of SAP solutions. All of the cloud server images include Microsoft Windows® 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, Microsoft SQL Server® 2012 Enterprise Edition and the SAP enhancement package 7 for SAP ERP 6.0. To activate the service, users must provide their own licences for SAP ERP.