In 2020, the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is organized around three new categories, which allow for a better comparability among diverse ideas and offer projects a better chance to stand out. Each category reflects a different type of breakthrough thinking, considering the various ways in which innovation drives SAP’s success.
Here, meet the finalists in the Operational Excellence category.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest
employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO
to an individual or a team.
Finalist: Monitor of Monitors
Some challenges turn out to be a steppingstone to something great. For one of the eight finalist teams, identifying and resolving problems in cloud services was just such a challenge.
Out of their own need, the Global Cloud Services (GCS) team came up with an idea on how to reduce the time and effort to monitor and correlate outages and service issues within cloud services.
“When you have an outage, every minute matters, every minute costs money,” Anthony Sanchez, vice president of Global Cloud Services, recalls. “By identifying problems faster and sooner we resolve that problem, saving our customer money as well as SAP.”
Over the course of four months, the team worked around the clock and developed the Monitor of Monitors — or MoM as they affectionately call it. This acronym is quite fitting as it illustrates what the innovation is about: like a mother looking out for the health and wellbeing of her children, GCS’s Monitor of Monitors oversees the health of the SAP suite of cloud services.
What started out as a team of five people, quickly grew to dozens of people who supported and contributed to the vision.
“We all love working on this project and think that love is contagious,” Sanchez explains.
Cloud Health at Your Fingertips
How does it work? Monitor of Monitors enables an exchange of information that is centralized and transparent. Through the tool, engineering, operations, support, and leadership teams all have the health of SAP’s cloud at their fingertips. This enables them to react more quickly to events that pose a risk to customers. By doing so, Monitor of Monitors helps SAP to operate the cloud more reliably and efficiently.
When asked, why he thinks his team should win the award, Sanchez’s response is quick and on point: “Monitor of Monitors is a tool that everyone can use; it isn’t a niche, and it has value for everyone in SAP.”
Anyone can get access to and start using it within minutes. In fact, numerous teams within the company already use the tool. As he says proudly: “Monitor of Monitors fosters the spirit of ‘One SAP.’ It encourages us all to work together as members of the SAP family.”
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission Title: The Monitor of Monitors (MoM)
- Team: Anthony Sanchez, Gabor Kaszonyi, Daniel Koller, Alexander Julian Danek, Gregory Melasecca-Jr, József Kertész, Yu Chen, Vittalraya Shenoy Adige, Marcus Mrozowski, Birk Bohne
- Number of employees: The team started as five and grew to 16 volunteers, with participation from dozens of people across SAP.
- Achievement: Massively reduced Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) from over 60 minutes to five minutes. Consolidated the number of dashboards from hundreds, to one, decreased Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) of multi-LoB outages to their lowest in more than two years.
- Impact: Everyone in SAP can use Monitor of Monitors, within minutes, to improve their cloud efficiency, bring value to their teams, and most importantly provide value, reliability, and assurance to SAP’s customers.
Finalist: Deploy with Confidence
Accelerating the transformation to the cloud is an important pillar in the SAP strategy. The innovators behind this team have set themselves a mission: with their solutions, they want to speed up and revolutionize this movement. “Confidence in the delivery process is more relevant than ever, considering that modern cloud-native applications are inherently distributed, introducing immense challenges,” explains Sarah Mueller, cloud engineering ambassador from the team. The Deploy with Confidence approach automates delivery, testing, and operational activities. This helps to increase developer productivity and reduce error rates to support the highest quality. Every cloud release to customers is done in a fully automated fashion. Features are engineered by constantly incorporating customer feedback. Results are delivered to the customer daily.
More Value for the Customer
The idea for Deploy with Confidence originated in a new cloud application project in which the team was involved. While delivering their software to the customer, Mueller and her team realized that they had the potential to improve the process and make it more valuable for the customer – Deploy with Confidence was born.
With their innovation, the Deploy with Confidence team “enables the transformation of on-premise organizations to the cloud,” Mueller explains.
People smiled at their idea at first, but they kept hearing that it would not work out. The team knew that they could make it possible. That experience led to a key learning for Mueller and her colleagues, which is to never stop, even if others tell you that you will never be able to solve a problem. With SAP Cloud ALM, the team has recorded their largest success so far, transforming an organization with more than 200 developers to the cloud. It is currently the largest application being engineered on SAP Cloud Platform, delivering to customers daily.
For Mueller and her team one thing is certain: “Deploy with Confidence is a key element for SAP’s goal to accelerating the transition to the cloud.”
The tool is already available and used within SAP and several frontrunner applications are now spreading across SAP. When asked why Mueller thinks her team should win the award, she responds with confidence: “We set ourselves a goal that seemed unachievable and, in the end, we revolutionized the way SAP delivers cloud software.”
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission Title: Deploy with Confidence
- Team: Sarah Mueller, Semjon Kopp, Jonas Breuer, Joerg Bastian, Damian Maring, Thomas Stein, Andreas Loebel, Philipp Thiele, Timon Schuele, Hans Schulz
- Number of employees: Team of 10 plus many contributors
- Achievement: Deploy with Confidence revolutionized the way SAP delivers cloud software proven by applications like SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Subscription Billing
- Impact: Deploy with Confidence accelerates SAP’s cloud transformation and enables cloud applications to deliver innovations daily.