Trans Austria Gasleitung Moves to AWS to Fuel Innovation and Growth

Trans Austria Gasleitung (TAG) GmbH uses AWS to fuel business expansion, ensure high availability for business-critical SAP and B2B applications, and enable innovation. The oil and gas company, based in Austria, manages a growing natural gas pipeline network. TAG worked with APN Partner Techedge Group to migrate its SAP environment, a B2B application, and other systems to AWS.

Every year, more than 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas are transported through pipelines across Austria. It’s all part of the natural gas network owned by Trans Austria Gasleitung GmbH (TAG), which manages 700 miles of pipelines that lead from the Austria-Slovakia border to the Austria-Italy border.

TAG has been growing quickly over the past five years. But keeping pace with this growth while optimizing its business-critical enterprise applications, such as a workforce management platform and data management and reporting applications, was challenging because TAG relied on traditional data centers. “Our applications were hosted on-premises and we had a limited IT infrastructure with just four physical servers,” says Alessandro Santucci, head of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) department at TAG. “Scaling applications to meet the needs of newly added employees was difficult.”

TAG also needed to directly manage a B2B commercial negotiation software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, based on SAP technology and previously provided by a third party. “We wanted to move the SaaS platform to our data center, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to support it,” Santucci says. “We realized a cloud solution could help us scale all our applications more easily, maintain high availability, and reduce costs.”

Following a comprehensive evaluation of cloud providers, TAG decided to move its SaaS solution to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We knew AWS could enable all our business goals,” says Santucci.

TAG turned to Techedge Group, a technology solutions provider and AWS Partner Network (APN) partner. Techedge, an Advanced Consulting Partner and SAP Competency Partner, worked closely with TAG to move the solution to AWS in less than two months.

Taking into account the successful SaaS solution migration and the speed of the transition, quality of service provided to the users, and cost of services compared to traditional approaches, TAG decided to move or directly deploy all business applications to AWS. These applications include SAP ERP, a workforce management platform, data management and reporting applications, a commercial dispatching solution, a geographic information system (GIS) applications, the institutional website, and an employee portal.

TAG runs its SaaS solution on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as its primary database for all enterprise application data. The company stores application data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). TAG is also taking advantage of Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for more than 100 TB of file storage. The organization also maintains some IT services on-premises to support physical servers located at stations along the pipelines. “For this reason, we maintain an advanced hybrid cloud architecture to connect our cloud and physical environments,” says Santucci.

Using AWS, TAG has on-demand compute capacity. “Because we can scale our applications more easily on AWS, we can expand faster and serve more customers,” says Santucci. In addition, TAG can ensure its applications are always available. “We need to meet strict SLAs for uptime to make sure our business-critical applications don’t go down, and that is easier to do because of the reliability of AWS,” says Santucci. 

TAG is taking advantage of the elasticity of AWS to scale up and down, which is helping the company reduce its annual maintenance costs by more than a third. Specifically, TAG is reducing the yearly costs for its formerly on-premises B2B solution by up to 45 percent, with improved service levels. TAG also developed a dynamic capacity management concept, using scale up/down, autoscaling, start/stop, reservations methodologies and, gradually, more and more serverless computing. Compared to a traditional approach to IT capacity management, this concept has enabled a 25 percent annual savings. “We expect to save even more money in the future as we integrate more AWS technologies into our environment,” Santucci says.

TAG is also enhancing its service delivery. “I’m not interested in managing IT. I’m interested in innovating and delivering the best services to our customers. We can focus more on those things by running our applications on AWS,” Santucci says. For example, the company has begun using microservices and Lambda functions to improve the resilience of data automation flows and to develop a next-generation data analytics and data governance architecture. Additionally, TAG is gradually introducing AWS development tools and processes to maximize the use of AWS managed services. “We can create development processes we didn’t have before without having to buy new hardware and software,” says Santucci. “As a result, our IT team can support the company as it undergoes a business transformation.”