Wharfedale Technologies Inc. (WFT Cloud) has announced global availability of its cloud service — plus the opening of a new R&D center in India — based on its sourcing business to host SAP® applications and other core operations. Now clients can turn to cloud computing for enterprise applications while reducing the overall cost of IT and at the same time, expanding online access and investing in innovative analytics, social business and mobile computing.

Many organizations are eager to leverage the economic advantages of cloud computing to run their critical applications. These applications require in-depth technical expertise, around-the-clock customer service, tight security and ongoing maintenance – features typically found in IT sourcing arrangements but not in the “one-size-fits-all” model of self-service clouds.

To address this, WFT developed an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud built on decades of SAP experience gained with more than 100+ clients. Called WFT Cloud, the service combines the best features of sourcing (high service level agreements, security and reliability) with the best features of cloud (elasticity and subscription-based pricing).

This service offers the same level of assurance normally associated with a hosted service to make certain clients can always access their core applications for ERP, CRM and BI Analytics from the cloud. The new service goes beyond IaaS which are typical in public clouds. In addition, this service also helps manage patch updates and identity management, thereby improving security which analysts often cite as an inhibitor to cloud adoption.

“This is a logical evolution of WFT’s sourcing business that gives us an advantage both in our services relationships and the cloud market as we define a new enterprise-grade cloud today,” said Ganesh Radhakrishnan, CEO of WFTCloud Services. “Our clients want sophisticated, economical cloud-based services that provide the same quality and service level as a private, hosted IT environment. With that assurance, they can focus more on driving business value from their data and operations and less on managing their IT."  

As customers expand their use of SAP applications to more business processes, they often benefit from more systems and greater management. Operating and managing IT environments running SAP solutions requires an advanced infrastructure and strong SAP operational skills.

WFT Cloud for SAP Applications automates and standardizes provisioning of IT environments, and can accelerate service delivery by their in-house expert certified staff. WFTCloud services for SAP applications deliver 99.7% availability based on the delivery model to support cloud-based systems around the clock.

SAP on Cloud, enabled by WFT Cloud, provides a more elastic and efficient utilization of an IT infrastructure resulting in improved availability, performance and service levels. WFT Cloud benefits include:

• Reduced time required to provision new SAP application servers from weeks or days to just minutes.
• Reduced hardware and software investments by up to 21% using scalable servers and virtualization management tools.
• Lowered implementation costs up to 35% as a result of simple setup and reconfiguration of virtual machines and the use of pre-configured templates.
• Saved up to 28% in continuously optimized project costs resulting from reduced system management and the ability to add or remove virtual machines on demand.
• Improved database and application performance by up to 52%, resulting from best-of-breed hardware, optimization, and tuning.

Cloud Computing is helping customers revolutionize their IT infrastructures and businesses.  This can transform implementations of SAP applications end to end – from sandbox to production. With this service, WFT takes responsibility and control of the SAP applications and provides management, including software patching of SAP solutions as well as support for the underlying operating system, database and middleware.  Clients may set up their SAP solutions development and test operations on WFT Cloud.