Nav­i­gate SAP on Azure waves

SAP and Microsoft announced in Octo­ber 2019 to expand the Embrace col­lab­o­ra­tion, which began ear­li­er that year. It is a cloud col­lab­o­ra­tion where the tech hous­es work more close­ly togeth­er to enable seam­less deploy­ment of SAP S/4HANA ERP solu­tions to Microsoft Azure and lever­age SAP Cloud Plat­form capa­bil­i­ties in Azure. The col­lab­o­ra­tion between SAP and Microsoft enables ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures, project plans, and best prac­tices that accel­er­ate projects and sup­port smooth tran­si­tions.

The goal of the col­lab­o­ra­tion is to facil­i­tate and sup­port the tran­si­tion of enter­prise ERP sys­tems to the Azure cloud envi­ron­ment. Sev­er­al com­pa­nies have either already moved their SAP plat­form to the cloud, or are plan­ning to move there. The trend to move to the cloud is on the rise. Cloud envi­ron­ments are already being used to a sig­nif­i­cant extent glob­al­ly in var­i­ous indus­tries, and as a result, com­pa­nies have accu­mu­lat­ed expe­ri­ence in exploit­ing it, includ­ing for busi­ness-crit­i­cal entities.

SAP cus­tomers can choose to ini­tial­ize a pub­lic, pri­vate, or hybrid cloud ser­vice, or oper­ate their sys­tem in an on-premise envi­ron­ment. Although cloud ser­vices are often more cost-effec­tive, the main moti­va­tors for the tran­si­tion are usu­al­ly the avail­abil­i­ty of infor­ma­tion, the improve­ment of ser­vice qual­i­ty and the deep­er exploita­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal ecosys­tems togeth­er. The cloud allows for scal­a­bil­i­ty, flex­i­ble exper­i­men­ta­tion, and a glob­al dimen­sion that is very rel­e­vant to all busi­ness in an ever-chang­ing world and now with remote work­ing becom­ing more common.

SAP’s deci­sion to select Microsoft as its pri­ma­ry part­ner for the plat­form reflects the shared com­mit­ment of these tech giants to dri­ve the growth of cloud ecosys­tems, fur­ther strength­en­ing the joint offer­ing. The col­lab­o­ra­tion aims to sim­pli­fy and stream­line the migra­tion of SAP ERP and S/4HANA to the cloud, but it will also lay the foun­da­tion for smooth project imple­men­ta­tions for new SAP cus­tomers. Of course, the oppor­tu­ni­ties cre­at­ed by dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion and cloud ser­vices for com­pa­nies are also at the center.

Last year, Islet car­ried out an SAP S/4HANA inno­va­tion project for Trans­meri Group, in which the com­pa­ny’s SAP ERP sys­tem was trans­ferred to SAP’s lat­est ERP tech­nol­o­gy, S/4HANA, in a “Proof of Con­cept” project, and the con­ver­sion was done on Microsoft­’s cloud plat­form, Azure. Trans­meri and Islet were among the first to car­ry out an inno­va­tion project in Europe. The POC project was a suc­cess and this year Trans­meri took the first step in the S/4HANA migra­tion when its cur­rent SAP ERP was migrat­ed to the Azure cloud plat­form and its con­tin­u­a­tion is now the migra­tion to S/4HANA on Azure. The expe­ri­ences of the project are very positive.

If you would like to dis­cuss migrat­ing your SAP envi­ron­ment to Azure or dif­fer­ent paths to SAP S/4HANA on Azure, please get in touch! Also lis­ten to our “SAP on Azure” webi­nar on the sub­ject (in Finnish).

Tom­mi Luo­to
CTO, Islet­ter
tommi.​luoto@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1261