LTI Reduces SAP IT Costs and Management Time Using AWS

Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) is a global technology consulting and digital solutions company that helps more than 250 clients succeed in a world where business is being transformed by digitization. To help clients accelerate their digitization journeys, LTI has built the LTI Mosaic platform, which supports mobile and social interactions, data analytics, the Internet of Things, and cloud infrastructures. LTI has operations in 27 countries with more than 20,000 employees across the globe.

In 2017, LTI unveiled a new brand identity, which includes the tagline “Let’s Solve.” This tagline reflects how LTI is helping its clients find ways to automate key processes—effectively digitizing their businesses. The unveiling also coincided with LTI’s own digitization program to adopt SAP S/4HANA, an in-memory database, which provides real-time data on a company’s performance so executives can make better-informed decisions.

A long-standing SAP customer and consultant, LTI ran its SAP systems from an on-premises data center. However, the company wanted to run SAP S/4HANA from a cloud-computing infrastructure. Kamal Shah, chief information officer of LTI, explains: “There were several benefits of moving from an on-premises environment to the cloud. We could reduce our capital IT costs because we no longer had to buy hardware. We could also make the IT behind our SAP system more agile, while cutting back on IT management through greater automation.”

Running SAP S/4HANA on a cloud platform would also enable LTI to extend its portfolio of services to include managing cloud-based SAP S/4HANA infrastructures. “We could shine a light on our SAP S/4HANA skills and enhance customer confidence in our SAP fully managed services,” comments Shah.

LTI specializes in migrating SAP systems from on premises to the cloud, and it used its SAP and cloud migration expertise to launch a replica test environment for SAP S/4HANA on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We saw how simple it was to deploy the solution on AWS, following a standard SAP S/4HANA installation guide,” says Shah.

LTI leveraged its own Cloud Center of Excellence, along with AWS Professional Services, to design and size the AWS infrastructure for the SAP solution. It then created a “sandbox” to test its SAP S/4HANA applications on the AWS Cloud before moving them to preproduction followed by a production platform. “We built our SAP S/4HANA infrastructure on AWS in a matter of weeks and transferred data from our on-premises data center to the AWS environments in just days,” says Shah. “It was a totally seamless process.” Today, the SAP S/4HANA infrastructure on the AWS Cloud supports all of LTI’s SAP financial and procurement applications.

The infrastructure runs on SAP-accredited Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Elastic Load Balancing distributing data traffic. The company takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage services and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for backups. To help optimize the infrastructure, LTI also uses AWS Lambda, which automatically shuts down non-production systems during quiet periods to reduce costs.

By adopting SAP S/4HANA running on the AWS Cloud, LTI executives now have real-time data on LTI operations. “We can now develop our strategies based on an up-to-date view of the business, which enables our executives to be more effective,” says Shah.

Besides improved decision making, the SAP infrastructure on AWS is significantly more cost-effective than the on-premises data center. “Our IT spend is now closely aligned to IT usage,” explains Shah. “We can scale IT resources up and down in parallel with demand. We no longer have IT going unused during quieter business periods.”

The agility also enables LTI to promote innovation. “At LTI, we have a customer-centric approach, which means we are continually looking for new ways to improve our response times,” says Shah. “We have been able to improve time-to-market in many areas with our core LTI applications running on AWS. For example, we have reduced the procure-to-deploy time for new hardware from weeks to minutes.”

Additionally, LTI has cut down on the amount of IT resources it needs for its SAP systems. “The auto-scaling and failover capabilities available with AWS services save the IT team a lot of time because they are no longer responsible for so many routine administration tasks,” notes Shah. “The self-service provisioning in AWS also lowers the management burden and frees up our staff to work on strategic projects.”

Finally, LTI can now demonstrate an expertise in running SAP S/4HANA on AWS. Shah says, “We can showcase our skill sets around SAP S/4HANA on AWS and reference the infrastructure in discussions with customers on our SAP S/4HANA managed services. It’s a powerful sales tool.”