SAP customers transform documents into data with OpenText on Google Cloud

An enterprise environment generates a staggering number of documents—contracts, orders, invoices, and receipts, to name a few. Each requires proper governance to store and manage over its lifetime. For SAP customers, attaching these documents to each transaction is relatively easy, but their sheer volume increases database size and slows performance.

An Enterprise Information Management (EIM) system turns documents into a resource rather than a burden, making them securely accessible to those who need them, whenever they need them, without affecting the performance of the organization’s SAP solutions. OpenText is not only a market leader in EIM, but it also has been a long-time SAP strategic partner with active solution co-development. Google Cloud selected OpenText as its preferred EIM. This allows SAP customers to combine OpenText capabilities along with advanced technologies like analytics and AI to streamline and automate workflows, and capitalize on critical data.

Unstructured data gets in shape with EIM 

The documents that an organization accumulates daily represent a huge volume of valuable data. But unlike the information stored in traditional databases, the data contained in these documents is unstructured, so extracting and analyzing it becomes more complex. At the same time, organizations must protect customer and other data from unauthorized access, and a growing body of regulations require that personally identifiable information (PII) be portable and deleted upon request. And for regulatory or legal reasons, proper data governance dictates that many documents be permanently destroyed at the end of their lifecycle.

An EIM inputs, protects, manages, and archives documents to handle all asset lifecycle tasks automatically. It digitizes documents, makes them securely available to those within and outside the organization as required, manages permissions to prevent unauthorized access, and moves data into the most cost-effective storage configuration. In an SAP environment, users can take advantage of all these capabilities without leaving the SAP interface.

Efficiency gains for structured data 

Proper management of structured data is also key for ERP-enabled business processes. 

Completed structured data, data relating to fully processed transactions in SAP, are required for auditing purposes. Moving this data from the SAP database to a less performant and less expensive storage medium and replacing them by a link to this external storage system to still provide access to this data both reduces costs and limits the growth of the SAP system database. A smaller database is cheaper, more performant but also makes it easier to manage key system processes such as backups and restores. Additionally system refreshes are faster, upgrades and support packages deployments take less time and cloud migrations can be done more rapidly.

Google Cloud, OpenText, and SAP bring the power of data to organizations  

With Google Cloud as OpenText’s preferred partner for enterprise cloud, SAP customers using OpenText gain flexibility and more powerful capabilities. For starters, OpenText offers managed services to securely manage, monitor and optimize information management solutions regardless of complexity, across existing on-premises infrastructure and Google Cloud. This seamlessly integrates EIM data with Google Cloud services, including BigQuery, for powerful analytics capabilities. More OpenText and Google Cloud integrations are planned that will further enable SAP on Google Cloud customers to maximize the value of their EIM data. 

OpenText can work on virtual machines (VMs), physical servers, or be deployed in containers, on premises or in the cloud. OpenText smooths your organization’s path to the cloud by offloading document images from SAP to a separate database, streamlining the SAP environment to make cloud migration faster and less complex, whether it is a lift and shift migration or an upgrade to SaaS. Once deployed, OpenText reduces the size of the target system, lowering the cost of the architecture and speeding up data transfer.

There are three ways to get your on-premises OpenText systems onto the Google Cloud:

• Lift and shift to cloud VM: This scenario works like an on-premises deployment, but with the cost savings and greater agility conferred by the cloud. You own a perpetual EIM license and can choose to manage the software yourself or have your partner manage it.

• Switch to Kubernetes: Here, you switch your existing OpenText from a deployment on physical servers or VMs to a deployment on containers to benefit from many features, including automatic scaling, high availability, and fault tolerance. You still have to own the license and manage the software yourself, or have it managed by a partner.  

• Migrate to modernize: In this scenario your EIM solution is fully managed in the cloud with Cloud Managed Services designed to handle the daily operations of IM applications, allowing in-house IT to focus on more strategic IT programs and innovation. It also frees up resources to focus on the core competencies of the business and provides a streamlined, single-vendor relationship. 

Closing the loop from data generation to analytics to action

The combination of OpenText and Google Cloud for SAP customers allows them to leverage OpenText’s leading EIM capabilities while combining them with advanced analytics and AI to streamline and automate workflows, and capitalize on critical data.  Learn more about how OpenText for SAP, powered by Google Cloud is closing the loop from data generation to analytics and action.