Ocean9
Redefining Enterprise Infrastructure through Database-as-a-Service and SAP-as-a-Service

Swen Conrad may have taken his time to bow out of the entrepreneurial role he held at SAP, but the timing could not have been better for the start of a new chapter. Ocean9 was born out of a dire need presented by the prevailing scenario in the enterprise IT market, where organizations were moving slower with respect to their cloud initiatives. By adopting an entirely different approach, “we have put the entire onboarding process to Azure and AWS in fast-track mode,” says Conrad, the CEO of Ocean9. The company is poised at the intersection of powerful enterprise-class mission critical applications like SAP and the public cloud—which by itself is very powerful.

Organizations face several issues including security, governance, and cost predictability when it comes to managing the new hybrid environment. This is where Conrad, who brings 20 years of business leadership in SAP, along with the company’s CTO, Frank Stienhans— the former AWS consulting lead for SAP workloads—places the unique proposition of having participated early in cloud-enabled business transformations. The company is all about keeping enterprises 24x7 available, secured, and high performing. To facilitate an easy transition to the cloud—from deployment of mission-critical applications through to ensuring business continuity and availability of up to 99.99 percent for enterprises—Ocean9 is an undertaking to redefine the enterprise infrastructure.

Ocean9 offers managed cloud services for SAP landscapes on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the clouds of managed services providers. “What traditionally takes around 4-6 months, the Ocean9 Intelligent Platform does in just 20 minutes,” says Conrad. Ocean9 also has a portfolio of fully automated services available for instant innovation and virtualized and containerized SAP HANA installations as well. Similarly, the company also assists clients in disaster recovery management, through fully-automated backup and DRaaS solutions.

An example to portray Ocean9’s proficiency is their work with Flashbrand, a real-time employee feedback company whose entire computing infrastructure is on AWS and is spending precious engineering time on managing and securing its cloud infrastructure.

What traditionally takes around 4-6 months, Ocean9 Platform does in just 20 minutes

Ocean9 offered an easier way to run SAP HANA—ensuring security, scalability and high availability without consuming precious engineering resources. Also, in the case of an SMB—who had a tightly integrated supply chain system running on SAP HANA—turned to Ocean9 looking for a strong backup/DR solution for their SAP applications, windows servers, and EDI integrations and reaped substantial benefits. In yet another instance, Ocean9 is providing a single tenant SAP Business One on SAP HANA solution with one-click provisioning and per user pricing. The result: Highest end-user performance and control at a highly competitive price point.

“Currently, we are focusing on SAP and SAP HANA use cases, but are starting to expand our Database-as-a-Service offering to Oracle DB and Microsoft SQL, which we see strong demand for,” says Swen. He adds, “Organizations are taking a big step by moving to a full SAP landscape built on the cloud. We see that not every company is ready to take this big step and hence are offering cloud-based “one-click” backup and disaster recovery solutions, both for existing on-premise SAP installations as well as for customers that have started cloud migrations on their own and are now needing help with securing and de-risking these environments.”

The company is continuously on a hunt for onboarding system integration partners as a part of its go-to-market. Enabling system integrators to serve their existing customers better and start building their own cloud center of excellence is what existing partners value. Cultivated with deep industry, solution, and technology experience, Ocean9 embraces the challenges of building large-scale systems from the ground up to provide leading capabilities in the cloud.