Migrating over 85,000 SQL Server Databases in About 8 Months Using Amazon EC2 with SAP Concur

SAP Concur provides solutions for managing expenses, invoices, and travel bookings to over 65,000 customers worldwide. Every month, the company generates more than 30 million expense reports and 5 million bookings.

SAP Concur had a complex architecture, supporting tenant-specific and multitenant databases. The company wanted to consolidate its infrastructure to focus on innovation and expansion. “We wanted to enhance the customer experience,” says Andre Lamego, chief technology officer of SAP Concur.

Using technical support and tools from AWS, SAP Concur migrated over 85,000 SQL Server databases in roughly 8 months. SAP Concur now hosts its infrastructure across four AWS Regions to support customers worldwide, with plans to expand into additional AWS Regions in the near future. The company chose to run its SQL Server instances on Amazon EC2 because of the level of control and license optimization benefits provided by AWS.

To plan for ongoing usage needs, SAP Concur performed an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA), which lets organizations optimize license and compute costs before and after migration. The company received support from AWS throughout the migration to assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and create a capacity plan. To equip its staff and build trust, SAP Concur worked alongside AWS to provide additional training and four lunch-and-learn sessions across multiple product teams.

SAP Concur saw an initial spike in compute costs while temporarily running dual workloads—one on premises and another on AWS. After completing the migration and optimizing its infrastructure, SAP Concur reduced its total cost of ownership by 72 percent. The company also managed to appropriately size environments and scale when needed, which helped it rapidly expand into new regions.

By accelerating the migration, SAP Concur was able to devote more resources to innovation and feature development. “Since migrating to AWS, we have concentrated more on serving our customers and less on managing infrastructure and scaling through physical data centers,” says Lamego.