WeEn Semiconductors Cuts Costs by 30% with SAP Migration, Using Atos and AWS

WeEn Semiconductors, based in Shanghai, China, has a history of developing and manufacturing semiconductors that goes back over 50 years. The company separated from NXP Semiconductors in 2015 but continued to develop a full portfolio of products. WeEn Semiconductors was running its business-critical SAP and order management systems from an on-premises data center, but the facility was experiencing regular power outages that caused both its internal staff and its partners problems when using essential systems. The company worked with Atos, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to migrate and deploy all business-critical applications, including SAP, to the cloud. The migration to AWS has eliminated downtime, improved security, and enhanced the company’s backup and disaster recovery systems. It also reduced infrastructure costs by 30 percent.

Based in Shanghai, WeEn Semiconductors designs and manufactures semiconductors used in a wide range of markets including telecoms, intelligent home appliances, automotive, and power management applications. With customers around the world, it works with a variety of suppliers in China and abroad through a network of global locations.

The company was running its SAP, office automation (OA), quotation, and order management systems in an on-premises data center but the facility was unreliable. Frequent maintenance and power outages took systems offline. “The overall level of power supply and network services of our data center didn’t meet our need for business continuity,” says Yang Zhaoyong, senior IT manager at WeEn Semiconductors. “It led to unwanted delays and poor experiences when our overseas branch offices accessed the OA system. We needed to spend a lot of money each year buying fixed assets for the data center. This was costly and increased the pressure on operations and maintenance.”

WeEn Semiconductors conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the mainstream cloud service providers in the market from the perspectives of reliability, availability, security, and maturity of services, and eventually chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the deployment of its SAP and OA workloads. It also appointed Atos, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, for technical advice and support during the migration.

Atos is an SAP global partner with nearly 13,500 SAP experts working in more than 40 countries and deep expertise in delivering and managing thousands of SAP migrations to the cloud. “We didn’t want any disruptions during the migration,” says Yang. “With its experience, Atos was the right partner to reduce any potential risks in our migration.”

The migration to AWS transformed the company’s IT infrastructure. Atos used AWS Availability Zones (AZ)—which are discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity—specifically those AZ located in China, to provide WeEn Semiconductors with reliable, high-bandwidth access to its SAP instances. Atos also migrated the company from multiple SQL databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which allows companies to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks.

WeEn Semiconductors also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

WeEn Semiconductors decided to also use the migration as an opportunity to build elastic development and testing environments, which could scale up and down as required. To improve the security and performance of applications, Atos used AWS Network Firewall, a managed network security service that makes it easy to deploy threat prevention, and AWS WAF, which helps protect apps and APIs against bots and common exploits that consume resources, skew metrics, or cause downtime.

The company also implemented Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances, and Amazon CloudFront, which allows you to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. In addition to improving security, WeEn has also found meeting compliance and audit requirements easier since the migration to AWS.

The migration has optimized costs and improved flexibility—technical staff are now free to work on higher value projects instead of infrastructure maintenance. “Not only have these AWS services improved the security of our applications, but they have also provided a better experience for both internal and external users,” says Yang. “Our site delivers pages more quickly and reliably. Our uptime is now at 99.9 percent.”

WeEn Semiconductors has achieved its initial goal of creating a robust, high-performance system for its SAP implementation. That alone would be a win, but working with Atos has resulted in wider benefits across the business. “We can now release idle resources immediately after their use, so we only pay for the resources we use,” says Yang. “After migrating to AWS, we are now able to use Amazon RDS, which has improved the availability of our applications and reduced the workloads for our operations and maintenance teams.”

The technical expertise and training—both in AWS and SAP—provided by Atos meant WeEn Semiconductors completed the migration on time and reduced overall costs. “The technical training sessions and their customer experiences helped us improve the services of our IT team and drive the delivery of the migration project with confidence,” says Yang. “We no longer need to reserve resources for the future, because we can scale whenever necessary. Using AWS saves nearly 30 percent over the cost of our on-premises data center. We can now invest those resources into growing the business.”

With the success of this complex migration of SAP and OA, WeEn Semiconductors plans to continue working with Atos to expand its cloud applications on AWS. In particular, the company wants to use big data analytics to accelerate its digital transformation. It’s a process of continual improvement, but with the right partner and the right solutions, WeEn Semiconductors is ready for the next phase.