SAP

Simplified Remote Access Gives Customers Easy Access to SAP Test Systems

Based in Walldorf, Germany, SAP specializes in developing professional business software. As part of its commitment to providing exceptional customer service, the company created an online test environment so that businesses could easily evaluate SAP solutions before investing in the software. To support this endeavor, SAP needed a simple, more secure remote access solution that would allow customers to connect with the test environment, regardless of the type of system they were using. After attempting to use terminal servers, SAP discovered the Microsoft® Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 solution. Now customers can quickly connect to the test environment using an Internet browser. As a result, costs associated with customer support have dropped dramatically.

Situation

Founded in 1972 as a regional software developer, SAP has grown to become a global leader in professional business software. Of the 2,000 largest companies in the world, 70 percent use SAP software. The company’s customized solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and product life cycle management are used by more than 86,000 businesses around the world, with more than 12 million users.

We can now offer our customers remote access that works from any system. This simplifies our customer support immensely. Bernd Herth SAP Center of Excellence; CTO, GOPA IT Consultants

Since its inception, SAP has been committed to offering high-quality, individualized customer service. As part of this initiative, the company manages a dedicated department, the Center of Excellence, that provides “value prototyping.” When a customer decides to switch its CRM system to SAP software, Center of Excellence employees build a test environment that replicates the customer’s system. Customers can then connect to a remote test environment and evaluate the SAP system for two to eight weeks prior to deploying it on-premises.

SAP employees work diligently to quickly build the prototypes and establish customer network access. Most installations—even the most complex scenarios—are completed within two days. “Smooth access for our customers is a core requirement,” explains Bernd Herth of the SAP Center of Excellence. “To date, we’ve built approximately 1,000 prototype environments, and continue to build 400 new ones each year.”

The main challenge to providing quick access was the need for customization. “Our primary challenge was that every one of our customers had their own unique infrastructure,” says Herth. The key question was how to easily give customers remote access to the SAP test environment from their own networks, and how to guide them to the correct test system.

SAP also needed to consider security. “Our customers sometimes work with their own business data in the test environment, which means we needed to protect them effectively,” notes Herth. “Our previous solution used terminal servers, so we needed administrative permissions to be able to install the client on customer computers. Unfortunately, most customers had only limited user permissions which meant that we had to ask the customers’ administrators to install the client, and then follow up with each customer to make sure the client was installed correctly. This was cumbersome and delayed access to the prototypes.”

Solution

At the end of 2007, SAP started looking for a new solution. The company was eager to evaluate Microsoft® Intelligent Application Gateway 2007—part of the Microsoft Forefront™ client security suite—for two reasons. First, most customers used desktop computers that ran the Windows® operating system, and the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) included with Windows XP and Windows Vista® could be used for remote access. Second, SAP wanted the ability to provide certain users with a single sign-on connection that linked to the Active Directory® service at SAP.

After participating in a workshop with a specialist from Microsoft, it was clear that Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 met all of the company’s requirements. The solution uses simple secure sockets layer (SSL) access from the Windows Internet Explorer® Internet browser, so customers only need to run an ActiveX® plug-in or a Java applet. “That can be done without administrative permissions,” Herth explains. “Customer-specific customization is easily managed using VBA [Visual Basic® for Applications] scripts that were written for us by Microsoft. In only eight days, all the scripts were adapted and extended. Also, our SAP coaches needed to be able to access more than one prototype at a time, so we established a link to Active Directory, which was simple and low cost. Implementation was much easier than we anticipated.”

Before remote access, we used to send 10 employees to the customer’s location for four weeks to build a test environment. Now, in less than two days, we can give our customers easy access to a prototype environment that we build in-house. Bernd Herth SAP Center of Excellence; CTO, GOPA IT Consultants

SAP decided to use Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 as a physical appliance. The preinstalled and preconfigured server in a compact 19-inch design came from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner SecureGUARD—an Austria-based appliance specialist—and is intended to serve as an application gateway. The server was up and running quickly, and the matching hardware combines high-performance (a 1HE server computer with a pair of quad-core CPUs) with low energy usage. The main advantages are maintenance and recovery features, a dedicated administration interface, high availability, and numerous hardware management features.

One requirement was being able to isolate different customer pools at the user level—when customers connect to Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 for remote access, they need to be assigned to one of approximately 50 available customer landscapes. This meant creating different groups and assigning users to those groups using a script. “Assigning customers to a group using a script solves a lot of problems,” notes Herth.

In the future, SAP plans to expand the SecureGUARD and Microsoft solutions with additional nodes. The goal is to use failover systems to reduce service outages and increase performance for customer access—if there is a problem with an instance of Intelligent Application Gateway 2007, a second system will take over immediately. Together with virtualized Intelligent Application Gateways, SAP hopes to improve test possibilities while offering additional services.

Benefits

With Intelligent Application Gateway 2007, SAP is able to provide its customers with seamless access to prototype environments. Customers can quickly and easily access their test environments via SSL without the need for additional clients, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time and money spent on customer support.

“We used to have to follow up with each customer and check if the client was installed correctly,” says Herth. “We can now offer our customers remote access that works from any system. This simplifies our customer support immensely. Customers from around the world can set up their own access without administrator rights in just a few minutes. This significantly reduces our support and communications overhead.”

Another advantage is that the customer support center can now connect to all Windows-based servers via the Remote Desktop feature, which most customers are familiar with and appreciate. All servers are available, not just special terminal servers.

“We love the flexibility that Intelligent Application Gateway gives us for configuration,” Herth concludes. “Before remote access, we used to send 10 employees to the customer’s location for four weeks to build a test environment. Now, in less than two days, we can give our customers easy access to a prototype environment that we build in-house. Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 saves us a huge amount of time and expense.”

Microsoft Forefront Product Portfolio
The Microsoft Forefront comprehensive line of business security products provides greater protection and control through integration with your existing IT infrastructure and through simplified deployment, management, and analysis. Forefront is a comprehensive solution that helps provide protection for the client operating system, application servers, and the network edge.

For more information about the Forefront product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/forefront

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about SecureGUARD GmbH products and services, call +43 732 601440 or visit the Web site at:
www.secureguard.at

For more information about SAP products and services, call +49 0800 5 343424 or visit the Web site at:
www.sap.de

Note: This case study has been translated from German.