SoftwareOne case study

Running SAP S/4HANA on Azure improves performance and security

Implementing SAP S/4HANA on Azure reduces infrastructure costs while increasing business and IT agility

A global oil and gas company moved its SAP solution from outdated infrastructure to the speed and flexibility of Azure to protect and enhance business critical systems. Upgrading to S/4HANA has increased security, decreased expense, and expedited processing. SoftwareOne SAP S/4HANA Implementation Services provided the required expertise from design to technical delivery.

Client: Global oil and gas company
Industry: Energy
Platform: Azure Cloud
Services: SAP S/4HANA Implementation Services

About the client

A global oil and gas company operating across the world and the value chain.

The challenge

The company is an early adopter and extensive user of SAP’s solution portfolio. In 2016 it was faced with an aging SAP solution in both software and hardware. Infrastructure constraints, prevented full in a testing of disaster recovery and business continuity processes without significant additional IT expense. Hosting its SAP solution on outdated infrastructure included a BW Accelerator appliance solution approaching end-of-life SAP support. As part of its strategic business direction, the company planned to adopt a new operating model. That meant the current SAP solution was not the ideal platform to support the new plan. As a result, a roadmap was developed for the introduction of a fresh S/4HANA system.

The solution

The initial SoftwareOne engagement was focused on migration of the customer’s entire SAP landscape to Microsoft Azure. The migration was delivered in two phases with less business-critical systems migrated first, followed by business-critical systems.

SoftwareOne experts designed the technical architecture for the customer’s SAP solution on Azure, then planned, executed, and managed the migration together with the customer. For the BW Accelerator, SoftwareOne experts switched the solution to a SQL Server column-based platform allowing retirement of the aging and expensive BW Accelerator component.

After the successful delivery of the SAP on cloud project, the customer re-engaged SoftwareOne for the move to S/4HANA on Azure. As with the first cloud migration projects, experts from SoftwareOne were responsible for the technical architecture design as well as technical delivery work deploying the customer’s greenfield S/4HANA system on the Azure cloud.

The result

The company has completed the SAP to Azure migration using the SoftwareOne SAP S/4HANA Implementation Services
The fully supported SAP solution leverages Azure flexibility and scalability
Full-cycle disaster recovery processes can be conducted as needed using Azure resources
Replacement of the BW Accelerator and avoidance of increased disaster recovery testing offset nearly 50% of migration costs
The business has seen an average 90% improvement for long running SAP processes