Lemongrass, a software-enabled services provider synonymous with SAP on Cloud, announced that it has significantly enhanced its Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) with new multi-cloud, data management, and DevOps capabilities, which makes SAP automation more extensible on the leading cloud platforms and enables users to operate with greater agility while minimizing costs.
Lemongrass helps some of the world’s largest and most complex users of SAP migrate and operate their mission-critical SAP workloads on hyperscale cloud. With Cloud-focused services including end-to-end support for the entire customer lifecycle spanning planning, discovery, migration, operation, automation, innovation, and data analytics, Lemongrass helps customers execute strategic plans and achieve their desired outcomes by realizing the full benefits of running SAP on hyperscale cloud.
LCP is Lemongrass’s governance, management, and automation orchestration solution that leverages proven methods for onboarding to the cloud and enables optimized operations for SAP and its related workloads. Over 750,000 SAP users across the leading cloud platforms leverage LCP every day.
CIO INFLUENCE: Organizations are Advancing their Digital Strategies with AI
LCP Update
SAP customers want to modernize their mission-critical SAP estates to be easier to change, better integrated, and easier to analyze. They want their SAP operations to be more reliable, more predictable, higher quality and have near-zero downtime at a substantially lower cost. The following are the major enhancements to LCP that enable these aspirations.
- Enhanced support for multi-cloud: LCP’s automation and management capabilities now work on three hyperscaler platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- SAP on Cloud abstraction and simplification: The LCP UI provides an easy-to-use tool to manage common build and operational tasks on any cloud. This means the journey to the cloud is simplified and in addition, if a customer is a multi-cloud customer, then common tasks are unified and abstracted across every cloud. All UI elements are also API based to enable clients to customize and integrate into custom dashboards and/or management tools.
- Eliminated downtime associated with managing SAP on Cloud: Most SAP users have mission-critical workloads and they use traditional operations techniques to manage them, resulting in significant planned and regular unplanned downtime. LCP uses DevOps Continuous Deployment principles to deliver minimized downtime operations for SAP.
- Orchestration Across DevOps & ITSM Tools: This release also includes native integration with industry-standard CI/CD toolchains and standardized development languages. Many customers have already started their journey to DevOps for key applications, however for SAP this journey is in its infancy. This approach is fully orchestrated through LCP which enables SAP to be treated in a similar fashion to other enterprise applications and allows the client to leverage automation standards and controls to SAP. This enables easier compliance, workflow integration with platforms such as ServiceNow, and the opportunity to gain auditable efficiencies through leveraging a standard approach across applications.
- Improved Automation Productivity. The LCP Object Library for SAP on Cloud, along with the LCP Code Repository, and coding framework enhances automation productivity, leverages automation being produced by the cloud providers and other key contributors, thus reducing the time to develop additional SAP automation and improving code re-use and quality. This allows customers to attract employee talent who prefer to work on more modern working practices and tools.
- Integration to Cloud-native Data Lake technologies: Lemongrass has built a series of accelerators to enable real-time availability of SAP data to be rapidly leveraged by Cloud Native Data services. These services utilize a series of pre-built data marts integrated with native hyperscaler SDKs that can enable rapid enhanced data analysis, enhanced visualization, and enable easier integration of both SAP and non-SAP data sources.
LCP Minimized Downtime Operations (MDO)
LCP’s patent-pending MDO revolutionizes the customer experience for running SAP in the cloud. Based on its extensible Object Model, LCP can orchestrate the build and maintenance of any SAP landscape, delivering high-quality, controlled agility for SAP customers. Applying the concept of an immutable SAP platform, LCP MDO includes zero-downtime resizing, immutable zero-downtime OS patching, near zero-downtime DB patching, near zero-downtime system refresh, integration to ServiceNow and integration to DevOps toolchains.
CIO INFLUENCE: Datadog Releases Data Streams Monitoring to Assess Streaming Data Pipeline Performance
“As companies move SAP to the cloud, they face increasing demands for patching and system changes to improve their security postures or allow them to respond to the availability of new cloud services,” said Eamonn O’Neill, CTO at Lemongrass. “LCP MDO addresses this need by making technical changes to the SAP platform transparent to the business users.”
Lemongrass momentum
Last year Lemongrass launched an expanded services portfolio to include multi-cloud options for enterprise customers. The move has fueled strong growth, including a CAGR of over 40%, a nearly 60% revenue growth rate year-over-year and almost 40% year-to-date headcount growth. Also in 2022, Lemongrass expanded its Global Delivery Center and sales capabilities to include South Africa and Malaysia and added new customers to a prestigious client roster including: Fender and Pactiv in North America, Pick n Pay and Transport for London in EMEA, Sarawak Energy and Jemena in APAC
“Our mission is to provide modern services to SAP customers across the best of the public cloud offerings,” said Mike Rosenbloom, CEO, Lemongrass. “We do this by extending standard native SAP capabilities and building focused services around them. We wrap these offerings in software – LCP – using a combination of tooling and automation to fully release the value of public hyperscale platforms. LCP is the glue to hold all the capabilities together and provide the rich operating environment that customers are looking for to maximize their SAP investment.”
CIO INFLUENCE: HTC Global Services and Azentio Software Confirm Strategic Partnership to Offer Next-Generation Digital BFSI Solutions
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
