This is a guest post written by Chance Veasey, SVP of SAP Line of Business, Velocity Technology Solutions.

The deadline to move to SAP S/4HANA was recently extended to 2027. Many companies are in the early stages of evaluating how and when to make this upgrade. For many organizations, the decision to adopt the cloud for their enterprise deployments is in the rear view mirror. Thus, migrating SAP to the cloud first, and then pursuing the upgrade to S/4HANA later, may be the best course of action for your company.

Migrating to the cloud now may allow your organization up to save 30–40% in operating costs*, helping fund your larger upgrade initiatives later. Once in the cloud, your organization can begin to adopt the advanced features available at Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as data lakes, machine learning, and IoT. This can democratize the delivery of advanced technologies to your business users.

This provides the time you need to consider the impact of the upgrade to S/4HANA. More than any other prior implementation, it is essential to merge and prepare technical and functional teams for the move to S/4HANA. That’s because with an S/4HANA implementation, you merge master ledgers, and your business processes meld with technology more than before.

Why SAP on AWS?

AWS and SAP have worked together for more than 10 years. AWS offers a large inventory of SAP-certified instances readily available for both production and non-production usage. AWS also offers global infrastructure, scalability, and security. A move to AWS helps you eliminate costly, resource-heavy physical infrastructure upgrades and kick-start your innovation.

When running SAP on AWS, you can enable new use cases, such as:

• Including implementing high availability (HA) or disaster recovery
• Deploying a hybrid cloud model
• Extending your SAP environment across multiple Availability Zones
• Integrating your data with a data lake.

About Velocity Technology Solutions

For a successful migration and post-migration, ongoing support, you need a partner who can approach the migration from both a technical and functional perspective. This is a differentiator for Velocity Technology Solutions.

Velocity is a managed services company with broad expertise working with ERP apps. We have more than 15 years of SAP experience across industries including manufacturing, healthcare, services, and more.

We are actively launching new SAP workloads on AWS every month. For example, in December, we migrated three customers on SAP to AWS.

Featured customer stories

It may be helpful to read examples of other customers we’ve supported in their migrations to SAP on AWS.

Performance Friction Brakes (PFC Brakes):

PFC Brakes manufactures brakes for motor sports, auto manufacturers, and first responders. The company had aging infrastructure, crashing software, custom code, and lean resources. At the same time, PFC Brakes faced a mandate for a digital transformation and cloud strategy. As the company sought to upgrade to S/4HANA, it needed a managed services company to help with the subsequent re-engineering and process changes.

With Velocity’s help, PFC Brakes implemented S/4HANA and integrated it with shop floor systems. The company now has a scalable, stable system that enables forecasting and financial reporting.

“The expertise Velocity Technology Solutions brings as an APN Premier Consulting Partner combined with their AWS SAP Competency status allows us to focus more on what we do best—manufacture, sell, and distribute premium brake products,” said Scott Sprouse, Vice President of Information Technology at Performance Friction Corporation. “As a customer, we are proud Velocity Technology Solutions has achieved this highest level of accreditation in the AWS Partner Network.”

Learn more about PFC Brakes through this webinar.

Figure 1: Velocity reference architecture for S/4HANA on AWS. Moving from on-premises to AWS allowed for less downtime and faster performance.

Change Healthcare

At AWS re:Invent 2019, Change Healthcare shared how Velocity led the company through an SAP and Oracle migration to AWS. Within 12 months, Change Healthcare migrated a total of 185 systems.

To hear the complete story, including insightful tips on planning and moving your own SAP workloads, watch the presentation.

Figure 2: The new IT infrastructure allowed the customer to be “digital enterprise” ready and turnaround times have been reduced from weeks to minutes.

Contact Velocity Technology Solutions

Whether you are getting started with planning your SAP migration to AWS, or need advanced assistance with specific workloads or questions, Velocity can help.

• Get in touch with Velocity Technology Solutions
• Read our AWS re:Invent 2019 recap
• Learn more about Velocity Technology Solutions

*Based on internal Velocity Technology Solutions data