SAP Migrated to Azure for Reduced IT Spend and Accelerated Operations

Using SoftwareONE's SAP on Hyperscaler Cloud migration service, this major Chinese electric utility increased SAP agility while reducing data center and infrastructure expenses. The new Hyperscaler design on Azure eliminates aging infrastructure, increases security, improves innovation, and cuts provisioning times from weeks to days.

Additionally, the customer was looking for opportunities to increase agility and performance in SAP operations to cater to faster-pace business innovation cycles. This was achieved by using SoftwareONE's PowerConnect for SAP and Splunk which monitors system performance across the SAP Landscape and even predicts system performance issues before they occur.

The company is a large electric power generation and distribution utility company in China.

The large electric utility company wanted to reduce IT expenses, particularly in data center and infrastructure spending, to support critical workloads such as SAP. Also, several components underpinning the SAP support landscape were approaching end-of-life.

After a detailed cost analysis, the customer’s IT leadership developed a strategy to migrate its SAP landscape to Microsoft Azure. The change was intended to increase agility in SAP operations and cater to faster-paced business innovation cycles.

Once SAP was migrated to the Microsoft Azure cloud, the customer kicked-off a continuous improvement initiative focused on improving overall system performance.

Calling on its full lifecycle SAP on Hyperscaler migration services, SoftwareONE experts designed and optimized the customer’s SAP technical architecture for Azure deployment. The team planned and executed the migration from on-premise to Azure in two-phases starting with the customer's back-office systems SAP ECC and SAP BW. This was followed by the front office and customer-facing retail billing system SAP IS-U (processing an annual $6B US transaction volume), SAP CRM, and the call center solution.

Following the SAP to Azure migration the customer embarked on a system performance improvement initiative and leveraging PowerConnect for SAP and Splunk to help monitor system critical processes and operations.

The entire project was delivered remotely by the SoftwareONE SAP Technology Services team.

• The re-designed SAP architecture and migration to Microsoft Azure has unlocked double-digit % IT cost savings
• SAP deployed on Microsoft Azure has improved overall security
• Requests from the business for IT innovation projects can now be serviced more responsively and with greater agility
• Provisioning times have been reduced from several weeks to a few merely days
• System performance was dramatically improved through PowerConnect