Tibor, at an event that we once held together with Corporates, you talked about the T-Systems product “M.A.R.S.”. Since this product is a way to save costs in IT integrations in the context of M&A, I would be pleased if we could present the product to a larger circle of readers again. Tibor, what does M.A.R.S. actually mean?
M.A.R.S. is an abbreviation and stands for Managed Application Retirement Services. This service is an “end-to-end” offering for the historization of data from system landscapes in a central cloud platform. Within the scope of this solution, SAP or non-SAP data can be stored in an unalterable and legally compliant manner in compliance with EU-DSGVO and remain available and searchable for the customer.
The customer can easily access his data pool from any location at any time via a URL. After data migration and historization, we at T-Systems also take over operation, as required, in a dedicated environment in the private or public cloud.
M.A.R.S. thus offers a simple, convenient solution for historizing parts of the complex IT systems from M&A transactions in the context of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and for reaping the benefits of this.
Perhaps you could explain to our readers what historization or archiving solutions are?
With pleasure. Unlike archiving, historization is about shutting down post-production legacy systems and moving all data to a modern and cost-effective system that allows data to be retrieved in one step.
Today, a cloud solution is usually used for this. The reasons for this often lie in the lower investment costs or total costs compared to the earlier solutions of using on-premises, i.e. in the in-house data center.
There is also the possibility of separating legacy systems from the proprietary hardware and operating them in the cloud. The technical term for this is “wrapping legacy in the cloud”. The advantage is that users can continue to work with their accustomed system. It is convenient and low-risk at first glance. But there are also many serious disadvantages, above all considerable costs and loss of know-how, if employees trained with the legacy system leave the company and there will be no employees with this specific know-how.
Especially the risk of employees leaving in the context of M&A transactions should not be underestimated.
What advantages can a customer achieve by using this solution?
Very simple: Our M.A.R.S. Services meet the individual requirements of grown system landscapes with SAP and non-SAP applications. Our standardized approach ensures that the documents and data to be transferred are 100% transferred to a highly secure platform operation in the private or public cloud.
And last but not least, all this with cost savings of up to 80%, data availability of over 30 years and long-term EU-DSGVO and GoBD conformity.
With cost savings of this kind, the business must be “humming”….
You are right, those customers who go on this journey are very satisfied with the results of our work. However, there are many companies that do not dare to take on the big task. They are afraid of making fatal mistakes that could endanger the entire business, always following the motto: “Never change a running system.
At the same time, many think that their applications are so individually built that no service provider could penetrate them. Even more so, many people cannot imagine that it is even possible to adequately map their individual functions, which they have painstakingly worked out, in our service. A thought that is understandable but wrong. As I said, at T-Systems we have already successfully transferred data from old SAP and non-SAP systems to a cloud-based history service for numerous companies. And in such a way that these companies were subsequently able to work much more efficiently than before, with cost savings of up to 80%.
That was what I wanted to hear again. I’m curious to hear what our readers have to say about it. Many thanks for the interview, Tibor.
