Client Background

Client: Mitie Group PLC 

Industry type: Facilities Management Services provider

Services: Infrastructure consultancy, facilities management, property management, energy and healthcare services

Number of employees: 53,000

Revenue: GBP 2.2 Bn

Geography: UK

Challenge

Mitie, one of UK’s largest providers of outsourced Facilities Management Services, wanted to modernize its IT infrastructure to drive significant cost optimization and ensure higher application availability. For performance enhancement, evergreen capability, and operational efficiency, they wanted to move their on-premise SAP instances to the cloud – specifically, the Microsoft Azure platform. Application landscape modernization was one of their key priorities.

Key business requirements

• Upgrade SAP ECC EHP from EHP5 to EHP8 including add-on Personas, SAP EA_HR, Open Text, and Winshuttle
• Operating System & Database were upgraded to the latest versions of Windows Server 2016 and MS SQL Server 2016 in line with SAP's recommendations
• HR EHP 0-8, with no functional changes
• Implement SolMan version 7.2
• Replace transport express with SAP ChaRM (Change & Request Management) for release management
• Enable single sign-on for SAP GUI and Direct Access

Mitie was looking for an agile and flexible long-term partner to help transform and run the SAP ecosystem landscape and drive value for their end customers with better performance and higher efficiency.

Solution

Already Mitie’s strategic partner in shaping their end-to-end digital journey, and combined with our deep capabilities and vast experience in executing similar cloud migration projects, Wipro conducted a cost-benefit analysis for cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure. The client selected Microsoft Azure as the cloud service platform after considering the implementation time and complexity factors, including business agility, cost savings, availability, and business disruption.

We performed the entire suite of services, including re-host, re-platform, and re-factor of workloads to the Azure environment using Wipro’s ‘Safe Passage to Cloud” framework. We defined a “to be” architecture of workloads in Azure covering the target subnet and firewall zone. All SAP systems in the client landscape – including SAP ECC, Solution Manager, Gateway, and PI – were migrated to Azure and tested for performance.

Benefits

Wipro’s “Safe Passage to Cloud” framework successfully migrated SAP to Azure Cloud, delivering multiple benefits to Mitie:

• Reduced license cost by replacing Transport express with SAP ChaRM
• Radically decreased password reset efforts via SSO for ERP system
• Optimized infrastructure, thus reduced cost for infrastructure managed services
• Higher application availability and performance, leading to higher agility and lower business disruption

Key Highlights

The production instance migration to the cloud and the EHP 8 upgrade were completed during a single system outage. By automating non-production systems of SAP VMs on Azure during non-business hours, disruption was minimized. The entire SAP migration was completed in just over 5 months with no critical tickets generated during hypercare or support— one of the lowest number of incidents for any project in the client’s organization.

Wipro’s integrated perspective towards cloud transformation and customer-centricity has ensured that Mitie has the best resources and senior management focus through all stages of the program. With a combined approach to upgrade and migrate, we improved client experience and reduced operational costs.