Informa and LTIMindtree Transform Operations, Gain Data-Driven Insights, and Innovate Using SAP on AWS

Leading events, digital services, and academic knowledge group Informa relies on SAP to run business-critical operations. Faced with inefficiencies in its previous on-premises setup, the company decided to migrate its SAP platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Working with AWS Partner LTIMindtree and using AWS ProServe, Informa successfully migrated these essential workloads to the cloud in a tight timeframe and with minimal disruption to users. Using AWS, Informa has transformed its operations, gained the ability to derive deeper insights from its data, and prepared itself for an innovative future.

Informa Group provides digital services, events, and scholarly publishing that connect specialists with knowledge to make them more productive. It’s an international organization with over 10,000 employees working in more than 30 countries around the world.

Like many enterprises, Informa relies on SAP to manage key, day-to-day financial operations and other essential functions. It needs instant access to data stored in its ERP platform to make strategic decisions about how to run its business. This became even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many events were cancelled or moved online at short notice.

Informa previously ran its SAP platform using an on-premises, third-party data center, but this arrangement limited its agility. Technical issues were time-consuming to resolve, and provisioning resources to experiment with new ideas was expensive and required advance notice.

Informa decided moving to the cloud was the answer. It set an ambitious delivery timetable to design, test, and migrate its SAP systems to AWS. With such tight deadlines, a focused and effective project team was essential for success. Following a competitive market engagement, Informa chose AWS Partner LTIMindtree to manage the migration to SAP on AWS and oversee ongoing operations for the system.

Prior to the migration, Informa had an internal team in place to oversee its SAP infrastructure but didn’t have the depth of technical knowledge required for the migration. “There was a huge amount of work to do around design and configuration—and we didn’t have enough bodies here to manage the project,” says Chris Cairney, global head of SAP platforms at Informa. “That’s where LTIMindtree came in.”

LTIMindtree has expertise in SAP, AWS, migrations, and ongoing operations, and has guided many enterprises through their cloud transformations. To provide additional support for the migration, Informa and LTIMindtree used AWS Professional Services (AWS ProServe), which has helped hundreds of leading enterprises and public sector organizations deliver their cloud initiatives.

The ProServe team’s resident architect offered ongoing advice on SAP on AWS, highlighted any deviations from best practice, and consulted on issues as needed. “LTIMindtree put together a design for the migration, and we and an AWS consultant would make sure they were a good fit,” says Cairney. “It was a truly collaborative process between the three teams.”

To build the business case for the cloud migration, Informa worked closely with LTIMindtree and AWS, collating numbers and helping to evaluate costs and projected benefits. Informa took advantage of investment incentives through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program.

When the teams approached the CFO for approval, everyone was nervous. “In the end, with the figures we’d worked up, the meeting wrapped up in about 20 minutes and we left with the CFO smiling,” says Cairney.

The migration program, managed by LTIMindtree, began in April 2021. The three parties collaborated to create a detailed design and architecture plan for the new platform before migrating any data.

Staying on target was a challenge because of the complexity of the systems. The Informa SAP installation has many integration points to internal and external systems—somewhere in the region of 130 different interfaces. Failure of any of these integration points might mean the company would have problems communicating with customers and vendors, so it was essential to have a robust plan in place to ensure the connectivity was not interrupted.

After detailed planning, design, and performance testing, LTIMindtree migrated Informa to SAP on AWS in 6 months. The new platform went live within the expected timeframe, in October 2021. “We planned and carried out the migration over a historically low-traffic weekend, so there was zero disruption to the business,” says Ramesh Rajasekaran, client partner at LTIMindtree. “This minimized downtime and disruption for the users and customers who rely on the critical information stored in Informa’s SAP platform.”

Extending Informa’s AWS Landing Zone to include an environment for SAP and putting in place disaster recovery safeguards helped to make the migration to AWS an even smoother process. “The highest compliment I can pay about the migration process is that no one has really noticed the shift itself—and there have been virtually zero performance issues post-migration,” says Cairney.

Since moving to AWS, Informa has matured its use of data so the business can derive deeper insights from it. The Informa team built a data lake to improve access to critical information. For cost-effective storage, it uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It also uses Amazon Aurora, a relationship database management system; Amazon RedShift, a cloud data warehouse; and Amazon Athena, an interactive query service.

System performance for SAP workloads has improved on AWS, reducing the time needed to run month-end financial reports. Costs for the new infrastructure are also lower, because the cloud-based system is simpler to maintain and doesn’t require licensing fees. Reliability has improved, too. Since moving to AWS, Informa has not experienced any infrastructure outages, compared to its previous setup, which experienced reliability issues.

Cairney and his team can now more easily satisfy data requests from internal stakeholders and external auditors. The new solution has also strenghtend Informa’s disaster recovery processes.

Critically, Informa has the flexibility to innovate by quickly prototyping and testing solutions, using AWS. “In minutes we can spin up new development environments to try out ideas and see if they’re viable,” says Cairney. “We’re doing work around provisioning data for other parts of the business using AWS tools. We’re also investigating the use of Amazon AppFlow and are looking at potentially the use of Amazon EventBridge to support future integration patterns.”

Meanwhile, LTIMindtree provides support and manages SAP on AWS for Informa around the clock. “We’re always evolving and maturing the platform while optimizing and improving reliability and performance,” says Ramesh. “This project adds to our track record of using AWS to help businesses transform, innovate, and grow as true cloud-native enterprises.”

Informa now has the capability to be more agile, more responsive to business needs, and spend more resources on innovation. “That’s one of the advantages of working with LTIMindtree,” says Cairney. “They have more resources and capability than us for supporting the platform—we couldn’t do this by ourselves.”