Building a Cloud Environment for 60+ Business Applications on AWS with Versuni

It’s the end of a long day, and you’re ready to relax. But you need some dinner inspiration first, so you scroll through dozens of recipes on the NutriU app and select one. You prepare ingredients and press a button, and the app sends the recipe to your air fryer, which runs a cook cycle optimized for the recipe that you’ve chosen. Now it’s time to kick back and enjoy the evening.

All this works seamlessly because of the behind-the-scenes work at Versuni,formerly known as Philips Domestic Appliances. From breathing clean air to enjoying a cup of coffee, it’s the simple moments in life that are of the utmost importance. And with Versuni’s innovative products, people can enjoy those moments better by turning their houses into homes.

When Versuni became a stand-alone company, it had to act fast to migrate its global technical estate—including more than 60 business apps and the company’s enterprise resource planning solution—to the cloud in only 18 months. “We looked at our environment, our systems, our ways of working, and our processes, and we saw that continuing the old ways would not help us become a new company,” says Marcel Bijl, cloud leader at Versuni. “We reimagined our company from scratch.”

Versuni builds on a 130-year tradition of innovation to deliver domestic appliances to over 100 countries. Before Versuni became a stand-alone entity, its large IT estate was complex. It had legacy apps that hadn’t been updated for decades running alongside new and recently optimized apps. Delivering an organizational change program for a company as large as Versuni on a tight deadline is a sizable task.

Versuni envisioned a cloud-first approach on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it planned a new way forward. To unify and simplify its systems, Versuni wanted to use the enterprise resource planning solution RISE with SAP on AWS, the solution of choice and innovation for more than 5,000 SAP customers. It also sought to replace a large pool of suppliers with a simpler offering, further streamlining each operational level. “Reducing the supplier landscape and cutting out interactions between suppliers helps us move and innovate much faster,” says Bijl.

Versuni made the accelerated transition to cloud solutions a priority as it prepared to go live and used two AWS Partners to meet its goals. Versuni engaged Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an AWS Partner, to deliver its core managed infrastructure on AWS and planned its migration alongside Schuberg Philis, an AWS Partner. This double collaboration helped Versuni implement its migration on a very tight deadline.

To verify that its planned architecture would meet Versuni’s use case, TCS worked alongside AWS Well-Architected, which helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing infrastructure, to conduct an AWS Well-Architected review on the new infrastructure. “AWS Well-Architected accelerated our first phase and got our core environment up and running faster,” says Bijl. Versuni also used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive program that accelerates cloud migrations with an outcome-driven methodology, to migrate 60 different applications to AWS quickly. “The way that using AWS supported us—starting from scratch—with programs like AWS MAP was so important for our transformation,” says Bijl.

While it was working with Schuberg Philis and TCS, Versuni engaged SAP, another AWS Partner, to set up its enterprise resource planning system, RISE with SAP on AWS. In this process, Versuni wanted to set up private access to its SAP offering, and it needed a gateway between SAP and AWS. For this use case, Versuni selected AWS Transit Gateway, which connects Amazon virtual private clouds and on-premises networks through a central hub. “Using AWS to connect different environments, different data flows, and different types of access has been a huge added value,” says Bijl. Following these acceleration and architecture efforts, Versuni launched its effort in earnest.

After 18 months of planning and preparation, the company was prepared to go live. “The speed in which we’ve done this is not typical for organizations of our size and range,” says Bijl. Yet even though it’s had to deliver quickly, all the migrations that Versuni has implemented have been a success. “Apart from planned cutovers, all the apps that have been migrated to AWS are running with no disruptions,” says Bijl.

Versuni likes being able to use modern services without devoting its teams to infrastructure management, so it uses AWS Enterprise Support—a concierge-like service to help businesses find success in the cloud—to supplement its activities. Because its systems will be managed by SAP, TCS, and AWS, Versuni does not have to allocate resources to maintaining infrastructure. In fact, its cloud team has only a few members.

Moving forward, Versuni feels confident that it can adapt, change, and grow in the years to come. “Flexibility is really important to us,” says Bijl. “Using AWS, the flexibility that we have to add additional environments, spin up transition landscapes, and decommission environments when we’re finished with them is great.” For example, to support Versuni’s connect services campaign, the company is using AWS IoT Core, a service to connect billions of Internet of Things devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure. Versuni plans to extend its use of Internet of Things solutions and build even more connected products—reflecting its mission to turn houses into homes.

Looking back over 18 months of the project, Versuni reports that it’s well on its way to meeting its goals. “It looks like we will fully achieve all the goals we envisioned,” says Bijl. “We have a 100 percent success rate on all the applications we intended to migrate to AWS.”