Simplify your SAP S/4HANA journey and innovate faster

This post was written by Fernando Castillo, Head WW SAP, at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This week will be my fifth year anniversary going to SAPPHIRE NOW as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team. During those five years, we’ve been able to help thousands of customers in their SAP journeys to AWS.

During this time, I have had the opportunity to travel around the world and connect with many SAP customers to understand their challenges and to help them find ways to overcome and achieve their goals. Through these interactions—from Seaco, Coca-Cola Icecek, and BP in the early days, to AIG, ENGIE, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Fast Retailing, FirstGroup, and many others more recently—two common themes have emerged as the key benefits of moving to AWS: retiring technical debt and accelerating innovation.

Retiring technical debt means that customers can move away from their old, inflexible, on-premises infrastructure and take advantage of modern DevOps, automation, and flexibility that only the cloud provides. Customers can now move to S/4HANA without long-term commitments, with the ability to explore with low risk and to deliver value to the business.

AWS and SAP on AWS competency partners have been developing multiple tools to simplify migrations to the AWS Cloud. For example, customers are able to provision certified HANA environments (2 TB / 4 TB) in minutes and shut them down with a simple command (or voice if you prefer to use Alexa). We just launched our AWS SAP S/4HANA Quick Start, which enables customers to build fully certified S/4HANA environments in less than 2.5 hours! ENGIE and Fast Retailing, known for their Uniqlo brand, are clear examples of how AWS has been instrumental in enterprises’ S/4HANA journeys.

Figure 1: How the AWS 100% software-defined cloud infrastructure helps retire technical debt

But customers don’t just want to move their SAP solutions from their on-premises data centers to AWS. They want to accelerate innovation. Customers are using SAP Cloud Platform, which runs in seven AWS Regions worldwide today, to enable innovation from both SAP and AWS. Customers are also taking advantage of the full range of AWS services, such as AWS IoT Core, to combine their data on edge devices with their SAP solutions. We are working very closely with SAP on cloud-to-cloud interoperability; stay tuned for more information this week.

Finally, a key component of how we are helping accelerate innovation is our industry focus. By working with many customers in multiple industries, we have been building industry solutions. For example, we have created certifications like GxP for Life Sciences and other reference architectures. At SAPPHIRE, you will be able to connect with our industry team that covers 13 distinct industries.

Figure 2: AWS innovation pillars and industries

With these topics in mind, when we started thinking about SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 and reflecting on the challenges SAP customers are facing and how we have been helping them, it became evident that Simplify your S/4HANA journey and innovate faster captured this year’s simple but powerful theme.

Figure 3: Today, AWS is helping customers retire their technical debt by helping them move to S/4HANA faster, with tools, methods, and competency partners. At the same time, AWS is helping accelerate innovation by taking advantage of SAP Cloud Platform, which is leveraging the innovation AWS brings.

I look forward to seeing you in Orlando. It’s going to be a very interesting week, with multiple announcements and great innovations showcased at our booth (#2000). We have a jam-packed week planned, with sessions, demos, social events, and opportunities to hear from our partner community. You’ll also be able to learn first-hand how you can join the many customers who have successfully migrated to AWS to take advantage of the innovations AWS has to offer.