innogy Czech Republic Evolves and Transforms its SAP Footprint on AWS

To keep pace and thrive in an era of constant change, energy companies are increasingly turning to technology-powered innovation. innogy SE, created in 2016 after a reorganization of power company RWE, puts technology and digitization at the heart of its growth strategy. The company’s Czech Republic branch knew that to continue to grow its business and optimize its focus on end users, it needed to evolve its business processes and IT capabilities simultaneously.

Having already chosen to use SAP and run SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS), innogy Czech Republic sought to optimize its use of both technologies. The company has run its financial processing software, using SAP NetWeaver, on AWS for many years. In an effort to accelerate its data processing and analytics speed, innogy Czech Republic decided to migrate its SAP Business Warehouse (BW) landscape from NetWeaver 7.3 to NetWeaver 7.5 and run BW on SAP HANA (BWoH). The company decided to replace its Oracle database with SAP HANA on AWS. By making these changes, innogy’s goals were to remove the burden of maintaining a legacy database, simplify data management, eliminate data redundancies, and eliminate I/O latency.

Critical for the innogy Czech Republic team was to provide a consistent user experience throughout its transformation while also retaining the functionality they had developed using BW. The team also wanted to maintain compliance with SAP requirements for SAP HANA production deployments.

innogy chose to approach its transformation in phases. The company started with a Proof of Concept (PoC) that took it from migrating and optimizing its SAP footprint on AWS to activating new Business Functions. The team engaged in extensive workshops to understand how to fully enable SAP BWoH to take advantage of AWS.

“The flexibility and scalability of AWS helped us accelerate the PoC implementation and testing,” says Petr Bohac, IT Infrastructure Manager. In accessing the feasibility of migrating to SAP HANA, innogy chose to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) X1 and X1e Instances. X1 Instances are a part of the Amazon EC2 memory-optimized instance family and are designed for running large-scale and in-memory applications in the AWS Cloud. X1 instances offer up to 1,952 GiB of DRAM based memory. Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 processors and offers up to 128 vCPUs. Both X1 and X1e Instances are certified by SAP to run BWoH production environments on AWS, as well as the next-generation Business Suite S/4HANA and Business Suite on HANA (SoH) on AWS.

“Large-scale, SAP-certified Amazon EC2 Instances provided us with streamlined computational power and capabilities, and they contributed to excellent performance improvements for our analytical reporting and data loading,” says Bohac.

Since migrating to BWoH, innogy has reduced its total processing time by 90 percent. The company also experienced significant improvements in online transaction data processing, with some reporting accelerated by 96 to 98 percent compared to how it ran in its previous environment. “The results we’ve experienced are outstanding. They represent a substantial improvement in our processing efficiency,” says Petr Matousek, head of IT for innogy.

innogy’s BW landscape can now use new, optimized HANA objects to perform complex queries, detailed analysis, high volumes of big data, and efficient aggregations. Looking forward, the company is excited to take advantage of SAP HANA smart data integration to explore new opportunities for real-time and delta extracts. “We believe the new features we can take advantage of will help us meet our goal of becoming an intelligent enterprise on the AWS Cloud,” says Matousek. “With our new SAP footprint on AWS, we believe we can unleash the power of our data to drive better business outcomes.”