Migrating to SAP S/4HANA on Azure Accelerates Business Processes

A global oil and gas company moved its SAP solution from outdated infrastructure to the speed and flexibility of Azure to protect and enhance business critical systems.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.

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

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 Hosting its SAP solution on outdated infrastructure included a BW Accelerator appliance solution approaching end-of-life SAP support.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 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 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