Transforming global IT moving to AWS for RISE with SAP and Agentic AI

“Our SAP landscape is very fragmented and outdated. We have many solutions that exist twice - or even multiple times around the globe, with varying upstream and downstream integrations across business areas,” explains Michael Hermann, Head of Global SAP Strategy, Architecture, and Transformation. “This complexity leads to enormous operational effort, ties up significant resources, and drives maintenance and upgrade costs.” The approaching end of maintenance for several SAP core products intensified redundant effort. As resources were consumed by keeping systems up to date, opportunities for innovation remained out of reach.

To address this, the organization centralized its mandate for SAP-related transformation and decision-making. It focused on eliminating redundant systems, establishing overarching SAP governance, guidelines, and processes, and transitioning to RISE with SAP on AWS to enable innovation. “We plan to reduce our applications by up to 60 percent over the next few years,” says Hermann. The organization is also preparing to modernize its remaining mainframe estate.

To align with SAP’s strategy, Mercedes-Benz chose AWS for RISE with SAP to unlock new capabilities including AI while lowering costs and complexity. The company began its migration by archiving, optimizing data volumes, refactoring code, sizing infrastructure requirements, limiting downtime, and backup/restore operations. The migration positions the organization to realize enhanced reliability, security, and efficiency on AWS. Integration work also drives automation and faster, data-driven decisions across the business. The RISE deployment leverages the latest and highest-performing Amazon EC2 instances, the u7i family.

In parallel, the central program team prepared the technical foundation by setting up interfaces, defining management processes, coordinating security standards, and building a robust operating organization to support future initiatives. The OneERP team simultaneously managed version upgrades, roll-ins, and other activities.

“We’re moving our SAP legacy systems now one by one to this new environment and we're very happy that we can do this together with AWS,” says Hermann. 

Mercedes-Benz looked to AWS and agentic AI to increase developer productivity and accelerate its mainframe migration. “We’ve infused AI into our migration journey and we ensure that we're always using the latest technology. We have a huge development hub in India, but also in other locations. Our experts there are increasingly using developer-tools that are supported by AI,” says Hermann. “As a result, developers report higher satisfaction as AI helps address routine questions and processes such as testing documentation and code-generation.”

Additionally, the organization is migrating its remaining mainframe applications to AWS, refactoring code with support from agentic AI. This is especially impactful when converting COBOL to Java using tools such as AWS Transform, leading to more efficiency and productivity and a much faster migration process.

As a result of the transformative impact of its SAP landscape migration to AWS, Mercedes-Benz IT can now increasingly focus on driving innovation. “The DNA of the partnership of Mercedes-Benz, AWS and SAP is quite special,” says Katrin Lehmann. “We want to ensure that our systems are highly available and that we have a clear path forward regarding innovation. All of us are excited about technological innovation, yet we are just as focused on ensuring stability and security—both are key elements of our partnership.”