GGroup Optimizes Performance by Migrating SAP Workloads to AWS with Support from VMEngine

GGroup, an Italian distributor of automotive parts, was being held back by its on-premises infrastructure. With the support of AWS Partner VMEngine, GGroup migrated the SAP workloads that managed its stock inventory, supply, and delivery to SAP Business One with AWS. It also completed that migration well ahead of schedule. As a result, the company can now scale faster, protect and back up its data, and ensure more robust business continuity, all while reducing costs per instance in its test environments.

GGroup is a long-established wholesale distributor of automotive spare parts in Italy, where it is based. Founded in 1948 and today part of the Autodis Italia group, the company has two offices and four logistics warehouses across Italy. GGroup distributes more than 180,000 types of spare parts for over 100 car brands and sells 6.8 million spare parts every year—95 percent of its revenue comes through its ecommerce channel.

GGroup’s SAP management suite was running on an outdated on-premises infrastructure and wasn’t able to keep up with the company’s growth or business operations requirements. The company needed to be able to scale to support its sales growth and to manage the inventory, supply, and delivery of stock from its four different warehouses in near-real time—something that wasn’t possible using its existing infrastructure.

GGroup decided to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to centralize and optimize its operations. The main objective was to guarantee the business continuity of its B2B sales channel. “Our turnover passes entirely through the B2B channel, both through direct customer access and through our sales staff and our assistance service,” says Bruno Tessitore, IT manager of GGroup. “We need to be able to respond immediately to market needs—and our customers need to know the availability of the goods in real time before submitting an order. Even an hour of system downtime can cost us €50,000 in lost revenue.”

GGroup chose to migrate to SAP Business One on AWS, but it needed a technical partner to manage the migration process. The company chose AWS Partner VMEngine, an Italy-based company that helps enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses integrate cloud computing into their IT strategies.

VMEngine started the process by planning a lift-and-shift migration to AWS. It individually migrated GGroup’s on-premises servers to a new AWS infrastructure based on Windows Server 2019 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

VMEngine also customized the company’s SAP workloads to ensure business processes could function optimally, meaning that GGroup can now focus on developing its offerings and growing its core business instead of having to worry about managing hardware.

In addition, to ensure maximum business continuity between offices and fulfillment centers, VMEngine also built in secure VPN-based connections between each of GGroup’s locations and the AWS infrastructure.

VMEngine did more than fully meet GGroup’s expectations—it completed the migration well ahead of the estimated 2-year timeline. Today, with its SAP workloads running on a scalable infrastructure on AWS, GGroup is benefiting from more reliable performance, including improved customer response times on its ecommerce site.

In addition, with its infrastructure running on AWS, GGroup can now focus on developing its offerings and growing its core business instead of having to worry about managing hardware. The company’s logistics centers operate in full autonomy, thanks to the near-real-time management of the offices made possible by cloud-based data storage.

To ensure that GGroup’s SAP workload application data and related databases are securely and automatically backed up on a daily and weekly basis, VMEngine deployed a combination of AWS Backup, to centrally automate and manage data protection, and AWS Backint Agent, to easily back up and restore the company’s SAP HANA database to AWS.

Keeping costs under control is critical to business profitability, so GGroup uses AWS Lambda to spin compute capacity up and down as needed. Using serverless means the company can optimize consumption costs for its test environments by automatically turning instances on and off according to demand. In addition to saving on compute costs, the company saves on energy costs using serverless technology.

Using Amazon CloudWatch, GGroup constantly monitors both individual instances and VPN connections. Doing this, the company can track consumption, resources, and performance of its operating environments.

GGroup has reported several benefits after its migration to AWS. “Thanks to AWS, we have maximized the reliability of our infrastructure by totally eliminating system downtime,” says Tessitore. “Freeing ourselves from having to manage on-premises servers means we have focused our efforts on growth and quality of customer service.”

The performance of the GGroup’s systems has improved—in particular, the B2B sales channel—and the company has greater peace of mind about system reliability. “The entire infrastructure is continuously monitored, so we can anticipate any critical issues and intervene even before anything happens,” says Tessitore.

The migration and system improvements could not have been completed without the support from its partner. “VMEngine have proved themselves to be professional, helpful, and highly competent,” says Tessitore. “The solutions they put in place have allowed us to acquire an important competitive advantage in terms of performance, safety, and reliability.”