Case Study | Global Financial Services Company
Financial Services Company Positioned for Continuous Innovation with SAP on Cloud
25%
Αbove cost savings target
4X
Recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) improvement
2 days
To spin up BW on HANA sandbox
A global leader in active fixed income management, this organization has over 3,000 employees globally and nearly $2 Trillion in assets under management.
“Find someone who is easy and responsive to work with, as an extension of your in-house team. We rely on Protera as a key partner in continuous modernization and adding value up the stack.”
– Vice President IT
Challenge
The IT team was nearing the end of a contract with a third-party hosting provider, and after continuous issues with stability and visibility into core business applications, were looking to modernize their stack and optimize performance. Specifically, the team had three main business drivers for change: reduce costs by 10%, improve delivery and agility of financial reporting, and adopt cloud as a basis for speed and innovation.
Solution
The company chose to lift-and-shift its SAP ECC, SAP BW, SAP BCS, and SAP BO applications to AWS with Protera as the migration and managed services provider. Pre-migration, the team conducted a technology hygiene exercise to eliminate redundancies and remove solutions or systems no longer needed, and after go-live, the Protera and AWS teams led a right-sizing exercise to review load and systems to immediately analyze over and under allocation. “We were immediately able to offload costs,” says their VP of IT. “This flexibility and immediate optimization were only possible by running on cloud.”
Results
The eight-week SAP cloud migration came with corporate objectives of unlocking efficiencies while reducing cost. Shortly after go-live, the company opted to upgrade SAP BW on HANA for improved demand planning and forecasting capabilities. In just two days, Protera launched a HANA sandbox instance on AWS, migrated reproduction data, and provided access to their team. “On cloud, we are learning in real time and continuously modernizing our stack. Getting BW to HANA was a big win, as our former third-party provider had technology limitations that prevented this modernization.”
Automation and cloud native technologies bring the flexibility required to improve operational efficiencies to deploy and shut down resources as needed, ensuring a scalable and secure environment for business functions. “We’ve been able to improve our RPO / RTO by 4X. We can quickly deploy resources as needed to keep our mission critical applications available, thanks to Protera and AWS.”
In the first 12 months on cloud, the company has had zero unplanned downtime and 100% availability. “Running SAP and running SAP on cloud are two different things. We wanted a partner with proven expertise of running SAP on the cloud to provide a competitive advantage.”
The future
The team continues to modernize its business by developing advanced capabilities in the cloud. Key areas of investment include preparing for an SAP S/4HANA transformation in 2025, as well as:
– Adopting FIORI and gateway with centralized and standardized processes,
– Leveraging ML, AI, and AWS Text Track for deeper data analytics capabilities,
– Eliminating spreadsheets and data silos,
– Enable SAP process orchestration of BTP, along with automation within SAP application itself.
