AWS for SAP

Take advantage of a two-way door to transform mission-critical SAP systems on AWS

Bas Kamphuis is a GM, Strategic ISVs at Amazon Web Services.

Nobody likes going through a one-way door.

After a one-way door shuts, there’s no easy way to get back to where you started. Your options are limited, and changing course requires you to invest even more time and resources into the journey you’ve unwittingly begun.

You might wish you never opened the door in the first place.

For many SAP customers, deciding how to deploy and run complex and mission-critical SAP environments is akin to walking through a one-way door. SAP is a critical tool for many enterprise operations, yet successfully deploying SAP has traditionally required significant capital investment, complex integrated system architecture design, customized solutions tailored to the stringent requirements of the enterprise, and a rigid IT backbone to ensure resiliency and dependability.

According to a recent research study by Resulting IT, SAP program implementation timelines sometimes stretch beyond intended delivery dates, costs exceed planned budget, and program results can miss expectations. When measuring success metrics such as project on-plan rates, on-budget rates, and on-value rates, Resulting IT found that:

  • Only 36% of the survey respondents felt that their SAP program kept to the original delivery plan
  • Fewer than 30% felt that their SAP program delivered to the agreed budget
  • Fewer than 48% felt that their SAP program achieved its business objects

Why should you walk through a one-way door when you can innovate and transform your SAP programs without barriers by deploying on AWS?

Embrace new SAP innovations by using a two-way door on AWS

Where a one-way door presents challenges, a two-way door presents opportunities.

You can walk right back through the door to begin again with a new approach. This type of flexibility, ease of use, and empowerment is what AWS strives to provide enterprise clients who seek to take advantage of innovative new SAP solutions such as S/4HANA but who struggle with knowing where to begin.

The security, agility, and speed characteristics of AWS enable SAP customers to experiment confidently and efficiently with different configurations and approaches for SAP and tailor an SAP program to meet their specific needs without significant upfront cost. For example, AWS offers a wide range of EC2 instance types that are certified by SAP for production deployment on AWS and can meet the needs of extremely large SAP customer use cases. With AWS, you don’t need to worry about accurately estimating the size of the target system right off-the-bat. You can, for instance, begin by using a system with 122 GiB of memory and within minutes transition to a system with 4 TiB of memory should you realize you need more system memory. And this works both ways: Because of the on-demand consumption model, you aren’t penalized should you change course or decide you need less memory. And as Jeff Barr shared in his blog post yesterday, AWS customers are soon able to scale to 12 TiB and beyond for their HANA scale-up deployments.

Many enterprise customers, including BP, Brooks Brothers, Coca-Cola İçecek (CCI), GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, Liberty Mutual, Moderna Therapeutics, Seaco, and Travis Perkins plc, have migrated SAP environments to AWS to securely run SAP applications with flexibility and at massive scale. As you look to migrate from a non-HANA database to SAP HANA, AWS offers many self-service tools you can use through the SAP Rapid Migration Test Program (FAST) to help reduce your migration time down to days, with minimal infrastructure cost. We’ve already seen many large organizations in 2018 use FAST to test their SAP ERP or BW installation systems on HANA. None of these tests took more than a few days, and the infrastructure cost was less than $1,000. The FAST program combines SAP tools and documentation with AWS tools and on-demand infrastructure to reduce the effort, time, and cost needed to test migration to SAP HANA.

And if you’re seeking assistance as you test SAP HANA through FAST tools or when you complete a large-scale SAP migration to AWS, you can turn to the global AWS & SAP Partner ecosystem. These AWS SAP Competency Partners have deep expertise and proven customer success helping companies migrate and deploy SAP workloads on AWS. For example, Seaco approached AWS SAP Competency Partner Lemongrass Consulting for help migrating its IT landscape to a new environment on AWS. “For Seaco, we completely migrated its IT landscape to AWS, including its SAP systems. By migrating to AWS, the company has achieved a 50 percent cost savings on its IT costs, and has saved considerable time on particular tasks,” explains Eamonn O’Neill, director at Lemongrass. “Seaco was suffering from a billing run that was taking four days a month to execute. When we migrated the company’s IT infrastructure to AWS, we were able to cut that down to one day. The business has achieved direct benefits from that migration.”

Achieve the full potential of digital transformation through the stability and agility of AWS for SAP

Traditional, on-premises options for running SAP environments simply can’t keep up with the needs of the modern enterprise looking to drive new business outcomes. AWS and SAP, however, are committed to building interoperability between AWS services and SAP solutions so that you can develop additional value for your end users and discover new insights from your data.

For example, SAP Cloud Platform is an open platform-as-a-service that provides customers and partners with in-memory capabilities, core platform services, and unique business services for building and extending personalized, collaborative, mobile-enabled cloud applications. SAP Cloud Platform supports AWS and is Generally Available in three AWS Regions, with one additional AWS Region in Beta. Using SAP Cloud Platform on AWS, you can take advantage of the stability of the AWS platform and the availability of emerging technologies, such as microservices, Internet of Things (IoT), advanced analytics, and machine learning to deliver agile applications.

Walk through a two-way door on AWS: Get to know us at SAPPHIRE NOW

Virtually all SAP solutions are certified to run on AWS, and none of the choices you make in the SAP landscape is going to hold you back. By using AWS, you’re free to change your mind, experiment to learn what works best, and take advantage of new service integrations to drive more value to your SAP program and your business.

Join thousands of enterprises around the globe and take the next step in your SAP journey by migrating your SAP systems to AWS and using AWS to optimize your SAP environments.

This year, AWS is a Sapphire-level sponsor at SAPPHIRE NOW. We have a booth at the event (Booth #642) and will be hosting in-booth presentations with SAP and some of our top AWS SAP Partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, DXC, Capgemini, iTelligence, Lemongrass, Linke IT, Protera Technologies, SUSE, and Intel, along with many AWS-driven presentations. If you’re attending the event, we’d love to meet you, learn more about your business needs, and look at how AWS may be able to help.

Not at SAPPHIRE NOW? We’ve had an exciting week! See our key announcements below:

To read more about how you can migrate SAP workloads to AWS, download our brand-new eBook to get started.