Altadia Group boosts SAP performance with Google Cloud

A post-merger need for IT modernisation

The Altadia Group is now the world’s largest manufacturer of frits, glazes, colours and inks for the ceramic tile industry. The company was formed following the merger of Esmalglass-itaca and Ferro Tile Coatings. An increased global presence and the pooling of the two businesses’ expertise enables the group to provide its customers with highly innovative solutions that are tailored to their needs and local requirements. Digital manufacturing processes that are environmentally friendly, flexible and cost-efficient have never been so important and this requires investment in the latest and most innovative technologies. Having audited its existing systems, the Altadia Group realised that alongside investment, it needed to look for support from third-party specialists.

Before the merger, a single centralised SAP system connected all related companies. The system worked with other IT services, including SAP Process Integration (PI) for e-invoicing and a data warehouse that ran on local servers in its main data centre, with a second data centre providing replication for backup. Following the formation of the Altadia Group, the company faced the challenges of almost doubling its number of employees in addition to the number of systems, each of which needed to be integrated into one, single SAP system.

With the complexity of the integration having become clear to the team at Altadia, it began considering a move to the cloud. The main priorities of the SAP systems modernisation project were to ensure it was more scalable and flexible while improving reliability and security. Considering its options, the company turned to SoftwareOne and Google; two companies with which it had collaborated on other IT projects over the course of the last 10 years.

Proof of concept makes the case for migration

Less than one week after SoftwareOne and Google proposed a proof of concept, Altadia had a test environment set up that enabled it to verify the technical feasibility of the cloud migration project while obtaining metrics and making performance comparisons.

The test environment enabled the team to carry out in-depth tests, measuring the latency, as well as the performance of the application front ends and databases on Google and compare this to the incumbent on-premises system. The team was also able to run tests on different system types, and models based on different scenarios.

We were surprised when the results showed that SAP on Google could not only match the performance of our existing SAP environment, but even improve on it.

The ability to grow and scale in a flexible way was key to our decision, as well as the peace of mind and confidence in the process, thanks to the SoftwareOne team and Google Cloud.

– Ernesto Plaza, CIO, Altadia Group

SoftwareOne then created a migration roadmap of the entire infrastructure to enable a smooth and effective transition of all SAP environments including SAP HANA to Google Cloud. This included building the landing zone on Google Cloud Platform alongside setting up code deployments for different SAP environments. This was completed at the same time as installing virtual machines (VMs) and establishing security features and permissions that provided a means of interlinking systems within the different environments.

After Altadia's SAP integration team performed the actual migration of the SAP environment and upgrade, SoftwareOne pulled the logs, moved them to a SIEM and further supported the team by migrating other environments to Google Cloud, including newly hosted SAP machines that still needed to be upgraded to the new version.