There are over 5,000 active AWS customers that are running their mission-critical workloads from SAP in the cloud of AWS, and over half have deployed SAP HANA-based solutions on AWS. SAP on AWS is a product of the two tech companies’ collaborative partnership to ensure SAP solutions are fully supported by SAP for production deployment in the AWS Cloud.
SAP has worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years to deliver business value to mutual customers, providing them with agility and speed without compromising on SAP’s industry-leading security, reliability, and scale. The strategic cloud alliance provides the continuous innovation SAP customers need to attract top talent, support their businesses growth initiatives, and turn digital disruption into opportunity.
In Australia, some of the enterprises that have leveraged SAP on AWS include Mitsui Coal Holdings (MCH), a holding company for Mitsui & Co.’s investments in Australia’s coalfields, and Visy, a leading packaging and recycling company with more than 120 locations across Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Since deploying SAP S/4HANA on AWS, MCH has achieved 99.9{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} uptimes of its business-critical reporting system. Similarly, by migrating Visy’s SAP environment to the AWS Cloud, the company was able to boost its SAP performance by 46{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd}.
This month, global sporting goods manufacturer and originator of athletic performance apparel Under Armour joins the roster of global SAP on AWS customers. The company has turned to AWS to modernise its SAP technology at scale, running mission-critical SAP platforms on AWS cloud to accelerate innovation, enhance security, increase resiliency, and deliver significant insights that drive business decisions across the organisation.
Running SAP in the Cloud
Under Armour is an American retail company with over $5 billion in annual revenue. Its brands include apparel, footwear, and equipment for men, women, and youth. The company’s competitiveness relies heavily on SAP software to maintain data integrity across business units including product development, merchandising, inventory management, and online order processing.
Commenting about the latest cloud investment, Danny Miles, Under Armour Chief Technology Officer, said:
“AWS is a critical element of our digital transformation, and we look forward to harnessing its industry-leading cloud capabilities as we enter our next stage of growth. With SAP in the cloud, we can now apply deep analytics and machine learning capabilities to drive greater efficiency across our business. With AWS, we are optimizing our product innovation processes to deliver premium consumer experiences wherever and whenever our customers choose to engage our brand.”
Earlier this year, Under Armour embarked on a modernisation journey migrating its SAP workloads to AWS, which established the foundation of enhancing performance and visibility across key business functions such as design, merchandising, planning, manufacturing, and supply chain, as well as sales distribution channels. In less than six months and with the help of the AWS Professional Services team, the company has moved several mission-critical applications to the AWS cloud, including its enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise reporting (BI, BOBJ), integration (PI/PO, data services), SAP Fiori, and solution manager workloads as well as its supply network collaboration and global trade services.
Furthermore, Under Armour also implemented AWS’ CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, an automated IT resilience solution that lets organisations recover their environment from unexpected infrastructure or application outages, data corruption, ransomware, or other malicious attacks– quickly and easily shifting their disaster recovery strategy to AWS. Aside from ensuring optimum system performance, CloudEndure Disaster Recovery empowers the company to minimise downtime and data loss with a cross-region disaster recovery solution.
Accelerating Modernisation
Advancing the company’s journey to the cloud, the American athletic performance brand has planned to integrate its SAP environments with AWS’ comprehensive technologies, specifically analytics, compute, machine learning, and storage. Under the modernisation partnership, Under Armour will be leveraging AWS capabilities to accelerate innovation in various manufacturing and sales areas such as digitally connected footwear and apparel, direct-to-consumer sales, and global wholesale distribution, among others.
Greg Pearson, Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales at Amazon Web Services, Inc. shared that AWS is supporting Under Armour’s venture in the cloud for its mission-critical SAP applications. He expressed:
“We’re helping Under Armour improve its responsiveness and scalability companywide while operating more securely. As the operational backbone of Under Armour’s business, maintaining a resilient SAP landscape is essential to empowering operational efficiency and speed to market. Like thousands of organisations that choose to run their SAP workloads on AWS, Under Armour did so because of our reliable and scalable infrastructure and breadth of services that help them get the most value out of their data.”
