Accenture migrates critical application to Microsoft Azure
Professional services and strategy firm Accenture migrated its 7-terabyte SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA estate to Microsoft Azure.
Accenture undertook a digital transformation as it looked to take on a next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would allow it to tap into the scalability, agility, analytics, speed and performance required to grow in future.
Part of this involved the company adopting a cloud-only datacenter strategy for all new business applications, aiming to either acquire cloud-based applications of develop its own cloud-exclusive software.
Daniel Kirner, Managing Director of Internal IT Operations and SAP Strategy at Accenture said that: “We’re moving into more diverse businesses, the economic environment is changing faster, and technology is changing faster. Because of all that change on the business side, IT needs to react faster.”
The aim was to transfer infrastructure management resources to development of platform as a service (PaaS). Kirner said: “The opportunities to operate with increased flexibility and agility in the cloud will lead to increased speed, productivity, and innovation—and that’s where the lasting business benefits lie.”
When Accenture came to migrate one of its critical applications, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), running on SAP HANA, it chose Microsoft Azure, with Kirner commenting that Azure “has premier capabilities to operate at scale—our SAP BW on HANA capabilities work flawlessly in Azure.”
Working together, Accenture, the Microsoft Azure team, and SAP migrated the 7-terabyte SAP BW to SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances in just six months.
This was achieved through three key steps, migrating SAP BW from an on-premises datacenter to Azure, migrating Accenture enterprise database from Microsoft SQL Server to SAP HANA via Unicode conversion and performing application upgrades o SAP BW 7.5 and to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) 10.1.
Upon completion of the migration, Accenture has experienced a five-week reduction in time to deliver new SAP HANA environments. Reliability and performance have also improved, with the company experiencing zero downtime during high-load periods, while there has also been a reduction in company’s costs.
Accenture has also seen a 38 per cent performance improvement on month-end close processing, as well as a 50 per cent increase in scalability, and a 70 per cent improvement in broadcasting data to downstream applications.
