Transport provider FirstGroup improves performance with SAP HANA on AWS
Transport services provider FirstGroup operates across the UK and North America, serving two billion passengers in 2017 alone through five divisions: First Student; First Transit; Greyhound; First Bus and First Rail.
One of its key focuses is its rail franchises, with its First Rail division operating three across the UK, carrying around 360 million passengers annually and investing heavily in technology to improve its services.
For over 12 years, SAP Business Intelligence (BI) has been First Rail’s primary platform for management information, reporting and analytics. The division built its environment on SAP Business Warehouse (BW), to manage and drive data insights.
However, initially hosting this on a private cloud, it experienced scalability challenges in process and running analysis on its data. As a result, it chose to upgrade SAP BW to run on SAP HANA.
Following an analysis of its existing provider, FirstGroup began to consider migrating BW to HANA on Amazon Web Services (AWS), having had positive experiences with the platform.
Seeking cost efficiency and other benefits offered by AWS, FirstGroup held discussions with AWS Professional Services to assess its options for migration and running the platform once it had migrated.
Together, they migrated SAP BW, SAP Portal, and Business Objects Business Intelligence (SAP BOBI) software to HANA on AWS, going live on time, on budget and with zero defects in the migration.
FirstGroup runs its 4 TB HANA analytics workload on four Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud X1.16xlarge instances, each powered by Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 processors, offering 64 vCPUs and 976 GiB of DRAM-based memory.
Since running SAP HANA on AWS, FirstGroup has seen an increase in performance that has driven better insights and encouraged further data analysis. Users have seen a 20x improvement in SAP application performance compared with the on-premises environment, and a 7x improvement in peak time performance.
FirstGroup’s backup and recovery capabilities have also improved, while AWS has enabled it to be busier with projects than anticipated. In future, it is looking to explore the analytics capabilities of AWS and use AWS-native services to drive further data-led insights.
