The SAP Demo Cloud (SDC) represents a game changer in the demo landscape provisioning business, making intelligent use of virtualization and cloud technologies to ensure agile deployment of demo showrooms/landscapes for SAP’s pre-sales force to showcase SAP Solutions to customers, partners and prospects.
Showroom Deployment
Different procedures are currently in use to manufacture and deploy demo showrooms out of the so-called Common Development Area (CDA), which is -so to say- the demo “master environment”, containing all of the systems that may be part of any demo landscape (currently 233 different living systems). These deployment procedures have proved very effective for large, predictable showrooms based on pre-defined solution clusters (e.g. LOB, HCM, etc.) but do not provide the flexibility, agility and simplicity required to quickly instantiate smaller showroom subsets: For example, any meaningful system combination that may be required at very short notice for a specific customer demo.
TDC (Training, Demo & Consulting) has designed, introduced and driven the implementation of CDA demo showroom variants to exactly fill this gap.
How Do Showroom Variants Work?
A variant is a basically a blueprint -a semantic description- of the business demo landscape that is later to be instantiated as a showroom. The variant contains all systems and additional configuration data required to efficiently (e.g. with reduced RAM and CPU) deploy a subset of components (VMs) out of a larger reference environment (the CDA or any other demo cloud template available in the regional data centers). Once a showroom has been deployed by the eCloudManager (back-end orchestration engine) via a variant, dedicated post-clone scripts run automatically to ensure consistency and connectivity in the new demo landscape that is then made available to the requesting pre-sales team on the SDC Portal (front-end).
Providing demo landscapes on demand has never been so easy and simple as it is today with the use of variants. For example, within an hour you can design and deploy an integrated demo showroom for any system combination that the Field may require for their demos. This has never been possible before!
Showroom variantsare also very cost-effective since they allow for customer-tailored deployments containing only the components required which –in turn- leads to a more efficient use of cloud resources.
Accessing variant-deployed demo showrooms via the SDC Portal
The Power of Variants
Variants have paved the way for a new, simplified and automated demo landscape provisioning with dramatically shorter delivery times and are heading for becoming the one single method to deploy all types of demo showrooms (private showrooms for specific demos, public showrooms with shared access for standard demos, etc.). The SAP Demo Cloud has the architectural potential, the technical components and the tool capabilities to fully support and drive the consolidation and simplification of demo showroom deployment. The variant’s technique has become “the” vehicle to make this a reality.
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