Currently, more than 5,000 Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers are actively running their critical SAP workloads in the AWS cloud. Organisations are able to take advantage of SAP to AWS cloud migration capabilities as a result of the tech firms’ continuous collaboration aimed at supporting SAP solutions for production deployment in the cloud.
As a long-term partner of the German enterprise software giant, AWS helps provide agility and speed to mutual clients while also ensuring the security, reliability, and scalability SAP is known for. As part of their strategic cloud alliance, the two companies provide SAP customers with the innovative products and services they need to gain a competitive advantage, attract the best talent, drive business growth, and accelerate digital transformation.
Some Australian enterprises that have already harnessed the power of SAP to AWS cloud migration are Mitsui Coal Holdings, a holding company for Mitsui’s investments in Australian coal developments, Visy, a privately-owned packaging and resource recovery corporation with over 120 locations across the region, and Konica Minolta, a market leader in integrated print hardware and solutions. Ever since its deployment of SAP S/4HANA on the AWS platform, Mitsui Coal Holdings has reached 99.9% uptime of its mission-critical reporting processes. Similarly, Visy has improved its SAP performance by 46% by moving its SAP landscape to the AWS cloud. Meanwhile, Konica Minolta achieved a holistic view of its customers by linking SAP data analytics systems on AWS.
Moving SAP to AWS Cloud Platform
This month, international independent wine retailer Direct Wines Ltd. has joined the growing list of SAP on AWS customers globally. The UK-based merchant tapped smartShift — a company dedicated to providing services for SAP automation, cloud transformation, and migration — as its implementation partner. According to the statement released, the modernisation project is geared towards enhancing Direct Wines Ltd.’s crucial SAP systems and migrating them to the AWS cloud. This is to equip their teams with a stronger platform for ongoing business operations, foster innovation by empowering their IT departments to create technological developments and deliver a better customer experience (CX).
Some of Direct Wines LTd. products are made from vineyard locations in England and Bordeaux as well as from wine-making facilities in South Australia and France. In addition to its primary markets in the UK, US, and Australia, the company also has franchise and distribution partnerships in continental Europe and Asia including countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India.
As a fast-growing company with a current turnover of £350 million, Direct Wines Ltd. needed to transform its processes in order to keep up with the business expansion. According to Direct Wines Ltd. Head of Architecture Leighton Francis, several updates and a heterogeneous migration were required by the company’s older version of SAP. He added that this had to be done with a limited SAP practice that was already occupied with other business projects.
“We searched for a partner that could support this migration and had experience with Public Cloud. For a small practice, we needed as much automation as possible to reduce development demands. smartShift impressed both in terms of their SAP Automation and knowledge, but importantly the culture and professionalism of the team,” Francis further explained.
Working Closely with AWS and smartShift
Jonathan Lake, SAP Business Manager at AWS, stated that teaming up with SmartShift to transition SAP workloads to the AWS cloud will allow Direct Wines Ltd. to operate with significantly better agility than they had previously experienced. He went on to say that the new environment could give Direct Wines Ltd. the ability to implement adjustments, address business demands more quickly, and provide strategic planning for the future.
Sharing more about their digital transformation project, Direct Wines Ltd. Chief Information Officer David Ives cited smartShift’s flexibility as a particular strength among other implementation partner companies. He noted that Direct Wines Ltd. needed to modernise and shift to the cloud, while at the same time, still being able to support existing systems. He stated:
“smartShift gave us a well-balanced solution that ensures future support while we work on our long-term roadmap. This is a complex project and we needed to validate the approach. smartShift shared the financial risk with a ‘Phase Zero’ implementation, initially investing their own effort upfront before subsequently following up with sensible payment milestones.”
“We’re confident that this implementation will be an important evolutionary step for our business,” Ives highlighted.
