Hassan Allam Pioneers Digital Growth in Egypt with AWS

Hassan Allam Holding has helped to develop Egypt’s infrastructure over the past 80 years, building roads, power stations, factories, hospitals, and commercial and residential real estate across the country.

More recently, though, the company has focused on spearheading Egypt’s digital growth, and it created a subsidiary called Hassan Allam Technologies in 2016 to help achieve this goal.

“We started the company in 2016 to provide complete integration, whether it's electrical, mechanical, or IT,” explains Sherif Youssef, chief executive officer at Hassan Allam Technologies. “We wanted to cover it all and ensure that we were set up to deliver new cloud-based products and services.” 

The first project to test the company’s new commitment to the cloud came about when Hassan Allam Holding requested an updated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

“We instigated a cloud-based ERP project because we needed an integrated system covering the complete business process, from the bidding and offering procedures to the final acceptance of the project,” says Youssef.
“This was especially important considering that we are a market leader in the construction field in Egypt.”

For its ERP solution, Hassan Allam Holding selected a cloud-based integration of SAP S/4HANA, so it could take advantage of the speed and performance benefits of columnar tables and in-memory analytics.

“We decided that we wanted to implement SAP S/4HANA, and I think we are one of the first companies in Egypt to do this, if not the first,” Youssef explains. “We knew that it would be a challenge, as it hadn’t been done before, but we wanted to show what was possible with cloud technologies.” 

Youssef’s personal experience of working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) went back to a previous role he had, where AWS was used extensively. “We saw that the future lay with cloud technology, and we recognized that AWS was already innovating,” Youssef says.

“So when we decided to implement the SAP for Hassan Allam Holding, we knew AWS would be key. And working with our Egyptian account manager, we discussed where we might need some help with this project. AWS recommended a partner called Syntax, which is based in Spain.” 

A specialist in SAP implementation on AWS, Syntax is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting partner and AWS SAP Competency partner, and helped Hassan Allam Holding with all its needs from migration setup to operations support and AWS infrastructure planning.

Syntax also helped to minimize risk and optimize time and cost.

And the company’s early fears of how a remote relationship might work turned out to be no problem. “On the question about remote support, I think it’s fair to say that our concerns have now vanished,” says Youssef.

Hassan Allam Technologies was impressed with how the SAP project was implemented on AWS. Overall, the shift to AWS cut issue response times from two to three days, down to just a couple of hours—usually less.

“We were able to provision new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, change CPU or memory requirements, increase Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and adapt to network changes in just minutes, without having to wait for hardware resources to be provisioned,” explains Guillermo Torres, AWS and SAP Solutions Architect at Syntax. 

Hassan Allam Holding was so impressed with the SAP S/4HANA project on AWS that it took the decision to continue with its own cloud adoption program and is now experiencing far fewer issues having moved from an on-premises data center model.

“After the success of the SAP S/4HANA project we moved from having the IT for each subsidiary being dealt with separately, to having a centralized hub for IT.

As a result, we are having fewer issues, with AWS solving everything remotely,” Youssef says. “I think you will see about 70 percent of traditional data center customers moving to cloud hosting within the next few years.

I’m telling government officials and business people in Egypt that not all the information they hold needs to be in an on-premises data center. Adopting cloud technology is vital for Egypt’s digital growth.”