Client background

• Client: A Norwegian retail cooperative
• Industry: Retail (grocery, hyper markets, low-price formats, DIY drive through stores)
• Geography: Norway
• Number of customers: 1.3 million
• Number of employees: 3,890
• Annual revenue: US$27 million (2018)

Challenges

Following a series of mergers, the client’s existing ERP became obsolete but the systems were required for reporting and legal reasons. With the client’s on-premises legacy infrastructure run on HP-UX without hardware licenses, continuing with it was not prudent as it would require large investments.

Solution

A 2-phase migration to Azure, comprising development and production, was planned for the client. Development Migration was performed with the intent to understand the various facets of the migration and to build hands-on experience. There was no need for parallel export/import as the legacy nature of the systems provided long downtimes. Premium disks were used for database migration and to reduce runtime. The disks were later changed back to standard to reduce costs.

The development systems were shut down because they were not required on a regular basis while the production was launched. All systems were upgraded to the latest operating system version of SUSE and the latest non-SAP patch versions to be in-line with SAP recommendations.

Business impact

• Reduced operational costs by ~75% with systems available only when needed
• On-premises capacity freed up for more critical systems
  
• Approximately 15 TB storage was saved in the on-premises pool by using cloud
  

Azure is not just a reliable cloud platform for SAP migration. It is also easier to manage and supports the broadest selection of operating systems and tools. The fact that it provides more options to unlock benefits made it an extremely attractive solution for the client.-Srinivas Sai Nidadhavolu Vice President & Global Practice Head - SAP, Wipro Limited.