AWS for SAP

What we learned from SAP customers at AWS re:Invent 2020

Each year, AWS re:Invent gives us an opportunity to connect with our customers, celebrate their successes, and announce new ways we intend to solve their challenges moving forward. While we couldn’t be together in person this year, we still had an incredible few weeks hearing from SAP customers as they showed us how they are using AWS as their platform of innovation and choice for SAP workloads.

Now that we’ve all had some time to catch our breath, I want to highlight the customers we heard from at re:Invent, so you can easily revisit your favorite sessions, or get caught up on anything you missed.

How Zalando tracks business performance in near real-time

  • Presented by Adam Hill, Principal Specialist Solution Architect, SAP, AWS and Yuriy Volosenko, Director for Enterprise Applications and Architecture, Zalando SE
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In this session, Zalando’s Yuriy Volosenko joined us to discuss their SAP innovation story. Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion platform, faced several challenges prior to working with AWS. They lacked agility, which made it challenging to deliver best-in-class e-commerce experiences, while their SAP footprint created significant costs, and complex management. By running SAP on AWS, Zalando was able to significantly cut their TCO, reduce maintenance tasks by over 30%, and gain agility to achieve business transformation. Additionally, by moving SAP to AWS, Zalando was able to eliminate custom integrations that created technical debt to start innovating on top of a clean core.

Check out this session to gain greater insight into Zalando’s solution, which included 36 AWS services integrations and a hybrid data architecture to support hundreds of terabytes of data.

Bristol Myers Squibb SAP GxP compliance requirements

  • Presented by Raj Bhatt, Sr. SAP Consultant, AWS and Linda McClellan, Director, SAP Technologies, Bristol Myers Squibb
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This re:Invent session featured Linda McClellan from Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) who shared the company’s two most urgent SAP on AWS goals: the need to transform their SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA and retire associated technical debt before the support deadline, and simplify GxP compliance processes. By leveraging AWS CloudFormation, BMS was able to implement an SAP automation framework that creates, updates, and deletes AWS resources based on parameter-driven inputs. This solution helped BMS rapidly stand up a GXP-compliant SAP S/4HANA architecture, fulfilling both of their initiatives. As a result, they’ve reduced SAP system provisioning efforts by 90% and SAP system provisioning costs by 67%, and can more simply assess and maintain GxP compliance.

If your organization is seeking guidance around accelerating SAP S/4HANA transformation and/or running SAP in a highly regulated industry, this session is for you.

How Newmont Migrated to SAP HANA while Acquiring GoldCorp

  • Presented by Sunil Yadav, Sr. Consultant, Professional Services, AWS and Om Singh, Senior Director, ERP Technical Platforms, Newmont Corporation
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Om Singh from Newmont joined us to discuss how running SAP on AWS helped facilitate the 2019 acquisition of GoldCorp Mining. In the M&A process, Newmont identified significant redundancy across their own and GoldCorp’s SAP environments and business processes. On the surface, it appeared Newmont had three options to eliminate this redundancy:

  1. Execute a brownfield cloud migration and delay an SAP S/4HANA upgrade
  2. Reduce their ECC footprint and pursue a brownfield SAP S/4HANA transformation
  3. Reduce their ECC footprint and deploy a greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation

Unsatisfied with these options, Newmont invented a fourth option with the help of AWS: they migrated their SAP ECC footprint to AWS, right-sized their systems on the cloud, and then executed an SAP S/4HANA upgrade. In pursuing this option, Newmont was able to reduce their operational costs by $530K/year, improve business continuity and lower both RTO and RPO, and attain central management of both Newmont and Goldcorp systems ensuring flexibility and scalability.

Watch this presentation to learn more about how AWS can simplify M&A activities for SAP customers, and also how migration can serve as a starting point for any transformation initiatives.

SAP Smart Factory: Inside Volkswagen’s Digital Production Platform

  • Presented by Chris Williams, Sr. SAP Innovation Architect, AWS Proessional Services and Christoph Groll, Senior IT Project Manager, Porsche AG
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In this presentation, Christoph Groll provided an inside look at Volkswagen’s Digital Production Platform (DPP). With a goal of improving manufacturing productivity by 30% by 2025, Volkswagen sought increased flexibility, harmonized IT systems, and greater operational transparency. This led to the implementation of DPP – a platform that combines real-time machine information from any global shop floor. The challenge that Volkswagen faced, however, was integrating their existing SAP solutions with DPP, since they were individually configured and differed greatly from the implementation scope. Additionally, SAP isn’t cloud-native out-of-the-box, leading to challenges such as a lack of IoT APIs, difficulty extending to serverless or container-based frameworks, and highly customized SAP integration requirements.

Watch this session to learn how the AWS Professional Services SAP Specialty Practice helped Volkswagen solve these challenges, in part by calling SAP natively and leveraging a microservices-based architecture for key operational processes. Now, Volkswagen can integrate any plant or SAP system with DPP.

Looking beyond infrastructure to drive your SAP business

  • Presented by Fernando Castillo, Head of WW SAP Partner Network and SAP Alliance, AWS
  • Watch this session

Are you interested in becoming an SAP on AWS Partner or looking to expand your offering set? This session is geared towards current and potential SAP on AWS Partners, showcasing different ways that our partner community is helping customers innovate with their SAP systems– and how partners are using AWS as their platform for innovation to build new AWS-based software solutions. In this presentation, you will learn about how AWS has and will continue to invest in dedicated SAP resources, as well as our partner programs. This includes:

  • Our dedicated SAP partner team, which can help you accelerate your growth, drive joint GTM and marketing programs, and more.
  • AWS SAP Competency program for those who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success in SAP implementation, migration, and innovation.
  • Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for SAP which pairs customers with partners who have built an SAP on AWS migration factory, giving customers consulting support, training, and services credits.

Partners will also learn about the different incentives for driving their SAP business with AWS, and certifications they can achieve along the way.

Future-proof your enterprise: Why SAP customers choose AWS

As you think about your SAP journey, it’s important to realize that you have options – there are many different approaches to getting more from your SAP systems. This session will help you better understand those options – from lifting-and-shifting existing SAP applications to AWS, to extending ECC to AWS services, or undergoing an SAP S/4HANA transformation. Regardless of which path is right for your business, we will meet you where you’re at and can help you start innovating with what you have.

Additionally, this session provides an overview of our history supporting SAP customers and how we are doing that today. There is no compression algorithm for experience, and we continue to leverage all the things we’ve learned from SAP customers, since the start of this journey, when SAP themselves became a customer in 2008.

Lastly, you’ll understand how we’ve applied these learnings as we’ve continued to invest in the technologies and programs that make AWS the best place to run your SAP workloads. It remains our mission to be the world’s most customer-centric technology company, and we’ll continue to innovate to improve the experience for SAP customers.

Thank you for another great re:Invent. We were thrilled to be able engage and connect with many of you. We look forward to another year supporting you on your SAP cloud journey. If you have any questions about SAP on AWS contact us, or visit aws.com/sap.