Paytm Supports Rapid Growth with Robust Reporting by Migrating to SAP on AWS

Millions of people across India rely on Paytm every day to manage their finances online and pay for everything from groceries to utilities to movie tickets. Paytm—which supports over 20 million merchants and business—is the largest digital payments, commerce, and financial services platform in India, used by more than 300 million Indians. 

Paytm has been experiencing rapid growth, achieving 76 percent year-on-year revenue growth based on its Q2 FY 2023 results. “Our vision is to serve half a million Indian customers with our payment platform, and we’re working toward that goal while creating a seamless customer experience,” says Ranjit Kumar, DevOps manager at Paytm. 

To support its rapid growth, the company has been expanding its SAP application environment to support financial record-keeping and other business processes. However, the on-premises data center hosting the organization’s SAP environment was causing scalability, stability, and reporting issues. “We had limited compute capacity in the data center, so we couldn’t scale the business easily,” Kumar says. “Stability was another challenge. Our system utilization was high during end-of-month reporting, and that caused some SAP applications to crash frequently during peak reporting hours. We need to send monthly invoices to customers and couldn’t finalize our reports on time.”

Paytm had been running multiple business applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and wanted to expand its AWS environment to include SAP. “We use AWS because of the scalability and stability it provides, which is exactly what we needed to improve our SAP applications,” says Kumar.

Paytm worked with a technology partner and migrated its SAP applications to AWS, leveraging Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. It also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store for high-performance block storage. As part of its ongoing modernization efforts, Paytm also deployed SAP S/4HANA on AWS. 

During the migration, Paytm leveraged AWS Launch Wizard for SAP, a service providing guidance for the sizing, configuration, and modernization of SAP applications on AWS according to AWS best practices. By using AWS Launch Wizard for SAP, Paytm reduced the time to deploy S/4HANA on AWS. “AWS Launch Wizard for SAP simplified our migration and setup, and we achieved a highly available SAP environment in hours versus days,” says Kumar.

By moving its SAP environment to AWS, Paytm gained the scalability required to support growth. “Scaling on AWS is easy. We simply adopt the right instance types and add more compute resources as the business grows,” says Kumar. 

Additionally, Paytm has increased stability for its SAP environment. “Running SAP on AWS provides more confidence from a network stability perspective,” says Kumar. “This is a key business requirement for us, and it offers a more reliable experience for our internal SAP users.”

Paytm’s SAP environment runs in several AWS Availability Zones, which improves application performance. After migrating to SAP on AWS, Paytm increased the number of invoices processed per minute by a thousandfold. 

Additionally, Paytm has decreased the time required to complete sales register reports from 30 hours to 4 hours. As a result of these performance improvements, Paytm can consistently close its month-end business activities on time.“

Furthermore, Paytm has reduced its SAP database backup times by 60 percent. “We no longer encounter backup performance issues, and that’s important because our data is expanding by multiple gigabytes every day,” Kumar says.

With SAP on AWS, Paytm can stay ahead of its financial services competitors. “We’re launching many new businesses, which means we’ll need to increase our data volume and require strong performance for our SAP applications,” says Kumar. “With AWS, we can continue transforming our business and provide our customers with better application performance.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/sap.