How Managecore is automating SAP operations with Avantra

By Derek du Preez

February 15, 2022

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(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay )

Managecore sells itself as a ‘different kind of company' in the SAP managed services market. Key to how it sets itself apart from other MSPs is its operational transparency, enabling customers to see exactly what Managecore sees, and automating SAP environments so that customers can focus on investing in innovation, rather than maintenance. 

Both of these differentiators are underpinned by Managecore's use of Avantra, a platform that specializes in automating SAP operations. diginomica has previously spoken with Avantra CEO John Appleby about how the company aims to help its customers shift the cost balance of their SAP environments from maintenance to investment. 

Nick Miletich, Chief Technology Officer at Managecore, explains that the company's symbiotic relationship with Avantra is helping to deliver value to customers that are grappling with complex SAP landscapes. Miletich says: 

We always want to be not only as efficient as possible, but to give our clients the best type of service we can. Over the years we've used many, many toolsets to monitor different aspects of SAP, the servers and the infrastructure that they run on. 

And there was never a solution that was really great at SAP. They often try to be everything to everyone and Avantra is different. They focused on SAP, they started there, and then expanded the other way. They expanded outward, but they started with SAP as their core. 

We want our consultants to really be consultants with these accounts, with these clients. Our clients expect a high level of service and they expect us to be providing value to them at every step of the way. And the value that we provide doesn't come in checking for really mundane trivial issues with the system. The value is: how do you use SAP to your best ability? How is your company or organization using SAP now and where should it go tomorrow?

Leaning into automation

Managecore says that it is using Avantra to take care of the trivial checks that customers would normally have to undertake manually, using the vendor's automation engine to carry out tedious work that operations managers would normally have to endure. Miletich says: 

We use its core capacity, but then we've really built upon it, to allow us to automate certain aspects of what we do.

It allows us to be more responsive to issues and really prevent them. The way Avantra works, it allows us to really be preventative and really have that proactive support that everyone's looking for, versus being reactive.

Miletich does say that any monitoring or automation solution is only as good as you set it up to be, so Managecore has spent a lot of time on configuring the platform for its clients' needs. Some examples of how its works for customers include: 

For example, if an alert says X, spin up another server.  Or if a security issue comes up for SAP, we're able to quickly, across our whole organization, create a check to look for that. We can see, are these clients impacted by it? 

You don't have to spend hours and hours and hours trying to look through that and figure it out. We can actually check within five minutes. And then Avantra has automation tools to do the fix for that, which happens to be a kernel patch. We have automation tools to do that, so Avantra can patch kernels automatically, instead of having to do every single system manually. 

But as noted above, transparency is also key to Managecore's success, and it is also making use of Avantra's dashboards to give clients customized insight into their SAP environments. Miletich explains: 

Each client is different - some may have multiple areas within their business function units - they may have an analytics practice, then they have the core ECC practice and then they may have finance. 

All those entities use SAP differently. So what we tend to do is create dashboards that are relevant to them. So you may see just ECC on a dashboard, you may see just production. The IT staff at that organization may see it all - but on a dashboard showing red, green, yellow - versus parsing through every single system trying to figure out what's going on. So we use dashboards heavily to really customize the experience that each individual client gets with us.

Bringing cloud automation to SAP

Managecore utilizes the public cloud for its clients, particularly Google Cloud, and its use of Avantra is helping it bring public cloud capabilities to SAP. Miletich says that SAP hasn't traditionally lended itself to some of the benefits of this technology, which Managecore sees as an opportunity for its business. Miletich explains: 

It's the limitation of the SAP software itself. SAP doesn't run in Kubernetes. It's not an environment that, from an IT administration standpoint, is as nimble as an environment you could put in Kubernetes, where one server goes down and everything still continues to operate. 

So what we've done for some of the automation is what you'd almost call pre-planning. We're big in the public cloud space, so we use a lot of automation connectivity between the environments to make that magic happen. As an example, you can correlate a CPU utilization metric, and if it's 90% utilized for over 30 minutes, we can spin up another application server for SAP. Those are the types of automation that we tend to gravitate towards. 

It's tying Avantra to SAP and it's tying the public cloud all together to make simple troubleshooting a non-issue. 

Avantra recently announced its latest Enterprise Edition, where it has rebuilt its automation engine for more sophisticated and complex use cases. Managecore is particularly interested in Avantra's autonomous patching capabilities and some of the AI/ML opportunities it has identified with SAP Graph.

But underpinning all of Managecore's use of Avantra is focusing on how it can ultimately shift its customers' time balance away from maintenance, towards new opportunities with SAP. Miletich says: 

I would say at its foundation, Avantra allows you to be more flexible and nimble, but also allows you to be in that innovative type of role and environment, rather than a day to day troubleshooting role. 

I'll give you an example from one of our clients. We moved them to Google Cloud and migrated them from one MSP to us. They've been with us since then, for four years. And this client, one of their key quotes was: "By moving to ManageCore as our managed services provider, using this product, it allows us to focus on innovation". 

They're not on calls asking why their system is down, or asking for more memory, all the things that go into managing an environment. They now can do additional net new innovative deployments that are correlated to SAP to better their business. And I think that's the key takeaway from a product like that.