Telia Company Turns to AWS to Power Financial Transformation

Telia had just under 11 months to manage a complex project to migrate its central SAP ERP systems to AWS, while simultaneously upgrading the software from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA.

Telia’s finance transformation is a crucial element in Telia’s overall digital transformation and will change the way it uses data to boost customer service and radically improve all aspects of its business. Telia operates in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, and Estonia, adding to the project’s complexity. Creating a single, central financial platform is a key enabler in the transformation.

Telia had less than 11 months to complete the project to migrate its ERP systems from its data centers and upgrade from SAP NetWeaver to SAP S/4HANA on AWS. “We chose AWS because we know they can move at the speed we needed to support the financial transformation with more agile teams. Simplifying our infrastructure footprint and access to a strong ecosystem of partners played an important role in our decision,” says Agnė Sokienė, head of enterprise services at Telia.

Telia approached partners to help with the project and AWS Professional Services and AWS Partner Accenture had the combined experience and were confident about migrating and upgrading at the same time, despite the complexity of the project.

While Telia has more than 800 software developers that use AWS to build and operate cloud applications, it still needed partners with specialist experience of S/4HANA migrations. Accenture had the SAP expertise, the right people, tools, and global reach that Telia needed. “They really embedded into our teams. It’s about the people, not the companies and we were lucky that some truly great people stepped up—from Accenture, from AWS, and our own people. We really felt like one team,” says Niklas Snellman, product owner, public cloud at Telia.

Telia’s S/4HANA system has been live on AWS for 15 months with no major issues or outages. The initial 15 TB of data was cleaned prior to migration and reduced to 4 TB, which eased the data transfer. Business processes have been improved and many infrastructure tasks are now automated, reducing manual tasks that overall allows Telia to meet new business demands faster.

Where previously Telia had to overprovision systems to allow for peak periods, it now has systems that can scale automatically. “The migration to AWS also improved our operating model. We now have the agility to optimize and control costs better in the future, and we have transformed the speed at which we can act. We have proven to the business that we can do this stuff at speed and with no disruption,” says Sokienė. “We have the infrastructure, the automation to run that infrastructure, and we have everything we need to take the next steps for the business.”

The migration worked because partner responsibilities were clearly delineated. The actual cut-over was achieved over a weekend. “We have much better visibility now. We can see costs and it’s very easy to decide what to do compared to on-premises. Our backup system is all SAP-certified too—it all just works,” says Olegas Matiušovas, head of SAP platform services at Telia.

Some large financial reports can now be processed 10 times faster than before, from an hour previously to 3-5 minutes using AWS, providing faster insights to teams across the company at reduced compute costs. Test environments can now be provisioned in hours rather than weeks. Automation has eased working life for infrastructure staff, and architecture, manageability, and governance are all easier to deal with.

AWS infrastructure provides the flexibility for future cost optimization which was not possible on previous systems. The company is confident that the improved agility is worth it and that better flexibility will allow it to make savings once optimization is under way.

Crucially, Telia now has a reliable infrastructure provided by AWS and the clean, useable data provided by SAP S/4HANA that it needs to take the next steps in transforming its business and becoming more customer- and data-centric. Telia is already using more SAP embedded products for financial consolidation and analytics and will add more in the future. The combination of reliable AWS infrastructure and SAP S/4HANA architecture is helping Telia move from batch to real-time financial processing and analytics. All entities across the group will now operate on a common financial platform so Telia can achieve its financial transformation while also optimizing operations.

It is also benefitting from process harmonization across the company, making Telia more unified in terms of financial processes. The team has created global templates, so different areas of the business can more easily create services.

Telia said the project success was a credit to the depth of the AWS ecosystem, maintaining business integrations with on-premises systems simplified the migration. Data is secured using AWS encryption services where Telia manages its own keys. Licensing RedHat OS through AWS Marketplace reduced the costs significantly. Telia also used AWS native services from NetApp for syncing files and Datadog for observability into how services were running.

This was a high-pressure project with a tight deadline and lots of subsequent work dependent on those deadlines being met. The success of the project has helped increase confidence in Telia’s IT function across the company, while its modernization is also helping to attract the best IT talent.

The IT team can now build a DevOps culture, spending less time on infrastructure. Telia also credits AWS and Accenture with speeding its time to market for new services and features.

But Telia also noted that moving to the cloud is more a cultural change than just changing data facilities. To really benefit from cloud migration the move must be embraced by the whole business.

The company is now extending its DevSecOps working practices into its infrastructure teams. Telia has launched a cloud academy, with help from AWS, which will train 10 percent of the staff, making it the largest in-house AWS training program in the Nordics. “We are reaching well beyond the IT department and are training 2,000 people across the company. We’re re-skilling and re-thinking the way we work across everything,” says Snellman. “A key benefit of cloud is the granularity of charging and costs. By training all our business owners we can give them a deeper understanding of the costs of our different services.”

Telia Cloud Academy is accelerating its digital transformation program with close to 1,000 employees participating in AWS training so far. By providing people with a deeper understanding of what the cloud can achieve, it will enable businesspeople to rethink how they work, and find new ways of using machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve customer experience across the whole Telia group.