Customer stories
Before delving into the details as to why Azure is the best cloud platform for all your workloads, let's start by looking at some of the existing customers that have already moved some or all of their SAP estate to Azure.
Carlsberg Group3 has been brewing since 1847 and is now the world's fourth largest beer manufacturer with 150 brands in more than 100 countries, and with net revenues in 2018 of DKK 62 billion (USD 9.4 billion). Some of Carlsberg's growth has come from acquisition, and this created IT challenges as each acquired company had its own IT systems. As part of a widescale corporate strategy (called SAIL'22), Carlsberg is embracing the cloud and digital technologies to drive product innovation and better experiences for customers.
Carlsberg's existing SAP estate was mostly running on IBM Power/AIX servers with an older version of the IBM DB2 database, except for SAP Business Warehouse, which was running on SAP HANA on SUSE Linux. As part of the migration to Azure Carlsberg migrated the AIX/DB2 SAP systems to Windows Server 2016 and Microsoft SQL Server 2016, and BW on HANA to Azure Large Instances. The solution is designed for both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) with failover to a secondary region. This whole migration was completed in six months.
In addition, Carlsberg has implemented the Carlsberg Analytics Platform (CAP) in Azure, which utilizes Azure Data Factory (ADF), Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 (ADLS Gen2), Azure Databricks, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Microsoft Power BI. CAP provides a unified platform for data analytics with the aim of allowing business analysts to gain new and improved insights from the structured and unstructured data that is now available.
As Sarah Haywood, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Technology of Carlsberg Group says: "We're seeing a huge benefit in terms of scalability. We build out resources in the cloud as we need them, in a way that would have been impossible in a physical datacenter. We also trust in the security of Azure, which is important for any business site."
For Daimler AG4 the challenge was to implement a new procurement system (NPS) to help the company transform its procurement services by providing greater transparency in contracts and unifying procurement processes across different business units and geographies. NPS was required to replace a legacy procurement system developed by Daimler in the 1990s that had become difficult to refresh, with the IT team only able to release new features a couple of times a year.
The new solution is based on SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) on HANA with SAP S/4HANA and the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform. Daimler had already used Azure to deliver connected car, truck, and van projects to outfit its vehicles with Internet of Things (IoT) intelligence and remote monitoring capabilities, while ICM is natively architected on Microsoft Azure. As part of this solution SAP HANA runs on multiple large Azure M-series virtual machines.
Using Azure, Daimler was able to transform a key operational system months faster than it would have by using traditional on-premises methods. To launch a project of this magnitude previously would have required up to 12 months just to acquire the necessary hardware, says Dr. Stephan Stathel, Operations Lead for New Procurement System and Team Lead for the Build2Run Team at Daimler AG. In Azure, we had the complete hardware set up in 12 weeks, which allowed development to start much sooner. We went live with NPS in just three months, which is unheard of by historic Daimler standards.
Coke One North America (CONA) is a platform that provides each of the 12 largest Coca-Cola Company bottling partners in North America with tools they need to collaborate as one company. CONA Services LLC manages the solution specifically to support bottlers in North America. For CONA Services one of their biggest challenges was that if the migration was successful then they would have migrated the biggest SAP HANA instance to Azure at that time. Their aim was to migrate a SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA system to SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances with SAP HANA in a scale-out 7+1 node configuration; 1 master node, 6 worker nodes, and 1 standby node. The SAP HANA database has a size of more than 12TB on disk, with 28TB of total memory on the active nodes.
Working with their partner and Microsoft CONA Services was able to complete the migration in just seven months, from initial planning to full production. The entire CONA platform now runs on Azure, making it easily accessible and scalable for bottlers and distributors. We get cost value with Azure right now, and we're starting to clearly see increased performance, says Brett Findley, Chief Services Officer at CONA Services. Plus, we now have a base we can build on to provide greater capabilities in analytics and machine learning—so the results will only get better. The new CONA Azure platform handles roughly 160,000 orders a day, which represents an annual $21 billion of net sales value. The company's bottlers use it to help them improve operations, speak the same technical language, and thrive in the digital age of bottling.
Hopefully these customer stories will reassure you that when you choose to move SAP to Azure you will not be the first. These are just some examples from the 800 (and that figure is growing) customers that have either moved to Azure or are in the process of moving.