North American mid-sized firms running SAP AG product looking to monitor performance and optimize storage now have a new option to do so with Acton, Mass.-based Claricent Inc.
The SAP reseller announced earlier this week it has penned a contract with Wakefield, U.K.-based DataVard Ltd. to exclusively sell two of the firm’s products in North America. Built on the SAP NetWeaver code stack, the products are designed to prevent problems from arising in a company’s technical infrastructure and reduce total cost of ownership for the German enterprise software’s business intelligence tools.
“Having worked in the space for a number of years, it was refreshing to see a toolset that came out that hit on the needs of a lot of smaller enterprises,” says David Fox, president at Claricent. “Data continues to grow at an alarming rate and technical staff is stretched significantly dealing with this problem.”
SAP is traditionally known as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) firm, but has been selling business intelligence (BI) software since its acquisition of Business Objects in 2007. Now SAP sees more installations of its BI software than its ERP system, says Mark About, president of SAP Canada. The firm has seen 35 per cent growth globally in the past year.
“Our new customers mostly buy analytics first, because that is the quickest to get ROI on,” he says.
Claricent will be offering CanaryCode, a performance monitoring tool for SAP installations. It has tools to diagnose and resolve problems, but also provides IT staff with real time information on the health of the system from a central, managed location. Users are able to customize what metrics will be tracked, and the program is a simple plug-in module that is ready to work out of the box.
“It provides real time visibility into where a bottleneck may reside,” Fox says.
OutBoard, the other product Claricent is now offering, works to reduce storage requirements for installations of SAP Business Information Warehouse. Described as “near-line storage,” OutBoard allows older data to be moved into a compressed archive outside of the active warehouse, but still be available for reports. It offers between an 8:1 and a 20:1 compression ratio.
“About 50 per cent of data goes unused, it’s just sitting there ageing,” Fox says. “This is part of the strategy to reduce the amount of storage needed.”
Claricent sells the products in either a one-time licence purchase model, or via a subscription model. Costing is based on the number of servers and the size of the data at play. Claricent would roll out the products as part of its application support services.
Claricent doesn’t currently have any Canadian customers, Fox says, but is happy to bring its services north of the border.
SAP relies on its channel partners to customize solutions for smaller firms, says Renee Giguere, national vice president for SME and channel at SAP Canada. There are proportionally more partners in Canada supporting SAP than in the U.S.
“We’re trying to win new customers in Canada still,” Giguere says of the SME space.
