The market for archiving in the SAP R/3 market has never been stronger or healthier. Rob Shaw, IXOS product manager at company Supported Software, examines the reasons for the surge of demand for archiving solutions in the R/3 world.
Worldwide we are seeing unprecedented demand for archiving in the SAP R/3 market. This is underscored by the growth of IXOS, which has maintained a growth rate of more than 50% a year for the last eight years (its 58% growth this year has taken it to annual revenues of more than $110 million).
More than 900 companies globally use IXOS`s technology to address some of the inherent challenges in SAP R/3; of these customer sites, 23 are in South Africa, making this the most successful IXOS market in the world, after Germany. All our research indicates that there are still more than 6 000 companies globally which will need archiving in their R/3 environment, making this a fertile market for many years to come. The need for archiving is driven by three issues: the need for data archiving; the need for document management; and the need to migrate from SAP R/2 to R/3.
Data archiving
It is in the nature of databases underpinning the SAP environment that they grow very fast - we know of customers locally whose application databases grow at a rate of 25GB a month. Many customers do not regard this as an issue in the beginning, but soon the performance of their new R/3 system begins to degrade, and the hardware which was perfectly matched to the customer`s requirements proves inadequate and underperforms. Soon the customer is having to upgrade disk and CPU on a regular basis and the cost of the system spirals.
The answer typically is to throw more disk and CPU at the problem; but it can mean upgrading the development, Q&A and production machines in parallel. There is also the issue of employing more and more database administrators, and the increasingly longer time it takes to back up the system.
The solution ultimately is to archive the data to optical media, physically deleting data out of the database as it is archived. This keeps the database at a constant, predictable size, reduces growth of the disk farm, maintains performance, and over time can lead to two-thirds reduction in total cost of ownership. The optical media satisfies legal requirements, and the data is still centrally accessible, although not directly online.
Document archiving
With R/3 being the backbone of a company`s processes and workflow, it makes good business sense to ensure that all documents form part of this workflow. This means that every category of document must be easily accessible from a central point, irrespective of their origin or nature.
So, R/3 customers are demanding that physical paper documents, fax (electronic or paper-based), e-mail, electronic data interchange (EDI), video, graphics; CAD/CAM, HTML and XML documents, generated within or outside of the R/3 environment, are made available from one location.
R/2 and legacy systems-to-R/3 data migration
While R/3 has become the world`s leading ERP system, thousands of companies still use mainframe-based systems. Many are migrating from the proprietary R/2 and other legacy systems to R/3; they then have the challenge of archiving the masses of data accumulated on the mainframe, and integrating it into R/3 so it can be accessed from within the new system.
Once the data has been archived and integrated into the new system, customers save significantly: they reduce their reliance on the mainframe, save on licensing costs, and it ultimately means the mainframe can be retired earlier, leading to even greater savings.
The second wave of ERP
While many analysts and industry observers have said ERP is dead as a technology and business issue, it is becoming clear that there is instead a second wave of ERP, which is beginning to break and will continue to break into the new millennium.
As identified by in a definitive study, the second wave of ERP is where companies look to use the existing ERP backbone to improve their business, speed up and optimise business process, and integrate other systems into the ERP system. In essence, companies are starting to demand the fulfilment of R/3`s huge potential.
This is creating a new market for ERP-related solutions and services which will last for several years; with thousands of companies facing the issues noted above, the need for R/3 archiving will continue to grow for years to come.
Bavaria-based IXOS is the world`s leading R/3-based archiving company, with more than 65% of the market.
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