Sapphire Migrates to SAP on AWS at Scale to Facilitate Digital Operations for Over 200 Businesses

Sapphire is a dynamic business transformation provider that serves clients in the United Kingdom and United States. The company specializes in serving midmarket-and-lower enterprise customers, helping them consume operational services in finance, supply chain, warehouse manufacturing and distribution, and asset operations. Realizing the potential of cloud technology, Sapphire began building a small footprint on AWS for its customers in the United States. Sapphire recognized that to support its ambitions for serving its customers core operational software needs, it needed to pivot to a new cloud strategy.

After reviewing the market extensively, Sapphire selected AWS as its cloud service provider of choice and planned a 3-year migration strategy. However, the company needed to accelerate its plans when it learned that one of its co-located data centers was closing suddenly. Sapphire had less than 9 months to migrate over 80 of its clients’ business applications and systems from more than 1,200 servers. “Every single one of those systems is integral to the business that’s operating on it,” says Chris Gabriel, chief strategy officer at Sapphire. “If we had attempted to rebuild in another shared environment, it would’ve been a Herculean effort.”

To help plan for its migration, Sapphire engaged AWS Partner Cloudreach. “The combination of AWS and Cloudreach’s involvement was really exciting and surprising,” says Gabriel. “That collaboration helped us accelerate our timeline, and it gave our teams a lot of confidence for working on AWS in the long term.”

Sapphire received extensive support for strategizing how to mobilize its resources to the cloud through AWS MAP. The company also began offering several training opportunities to upskill its staff. Between March and September 2022, Sapphire migrated 85 percent of its clients to SAP on AWS, a service that offers proven approaches backed by unmatched experience supporting SAP customers in the cloud. Since then, the company has reduced its operational overhead while increasing its profitability. Sapphire’s teams can focus on their customers instead of infrastructure maintenance as well. With the extra time savings, Sapphire has created a comprehensive 5-year road map that includes releasing more data-driven products.

Sapphire’s customers who migrated to the cloud early benefited from a reliable, more consistent experience than on premises. Sapphire avoided unplanned downtime and has experienced an almost 10 percent reduction in customer support tickets so far. “AWS helped us work backwards so that we can focus on enhancing the experience of our customers, but we aren’t responsible for every single thing on the backend,” says Gabriel. Sapphire projects that the number of infrastructure support tickets it receives will drop even further—by 75 percent—after it migrates the remainder of its clients to AWS. Since starting its migration, the company has also grown its cloud customer base by an additional 20 percent over an 18-month time frame. As of 2023, the company has launched over 200 businesses to SAP on AWS.

Sapphire and the AWS teams share similar goals of delivering a combination of off-the-shelf and simple-to-build approaches by adopting cloud-native services and microservices for their customers. By migrating to AWS, Sapphire’s customers can achieve these benefits through a variety of purpose-built solutions, including SAP Business One on AWS, a small-business solution supported by SAP for production on AWS. Sapphire deploys SAP Business One on AWS alongside Cloudflex4, which gives its customers access to a range of digital services, from advanced data analytics to process and workflow automation. “We help businesses operate with excellence by tapping into their operational data assets,” says Gabriel. “Using SAP on AWS, we can tap into data from our customers’ financial, supply chain, or asset management systems to help them transform how they operate their business, make decisions, or drive business productivity.”

Sapphire has continued to optimize the performance of its infrastructure by using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, which helped its teams learn best practices and apply important design considerations. The insights that the Sapphire team gleaned led the company to establish a Cloud Center of Excellence, an internal team that facilitates business agility by establishing enterprise-wide governance and security measures. In turn, Sapphire’s customers can have peace of mind knowing that their systems are architected and deployed in accordance with AWS best practices. “If we sell systems that help companies operate with excellence, we’ve got to operate with excellence ourselves,” says Gabriel. “AWS makes that very tangible for us to deliver.”