SAP systems are the lifeblood of many companies and lie at the heart of many critical business activities. Rightly or wrongly, some consider SAP to be highly complex, monolithic, difficult to modify, challenging when working with a mix of old and new versions, and overall, just not as straightforward as it should be.
Simply thinking about making potential changes to SAP workloads or associated infrastructure can cause pulses to race. The stresses and headaches that these changes often bring can feel like just too much to bear. In some cases, making changes and updates simply aren’t possible due to the ‘catch 22’ of needing to technically update to maintain the system health, stability, and security but not being able to get the required downtime from the business to make the changes. In addition, the pressure to reduce operating costs across the business is greater than it has ever been, and generally, when it comes to reviewing costs, it’s known that there’s usually an impact downstream somewhere. This frequently comes in the form of reduced levels of service. For CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, changes, and updates that negatively impact their business, their customers, and/or their employees, as these activities have been known to do, just does not make good business sense.
Then, why are 170 of Lemongrass’s customers realizing optimized operating costs, increased resilience, greater agility, and flexibility, as well as developing more innovative approaches in their own businesses and markets?
Reducing operating costs while at the same time unlocking additional business value, greater security, and new version enhancements may have previously been deemed the Holy Grail, but that’s no longer the case. It’s become the new norm for many companies. They are realizing benefits in the here and now and will continue to do so for the mid-and long-term.
The Recipe for Success
So, how are they doing this? They are doing this by migrating and operating their SAP workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
There is no one size fits all here but each has taken advantage of Lemongrass’s extensive experience and knowledge of both SAP and AWS to plan, migrate and operate their SAP workloads on AWS as part of their proactive and strategic approach to achieving improved costs and operational performance. What’s vitally important here, is that each company chose the approach, as well as the degrees of change, that were right for their business.
The approach that each company has taken has been carefully considered with each phase carefully planned. Some have chosen to digitally transform their organization by moving to SAP S/4HANA and to the cloud simultaneously. Others have taken a more staggered approach but all have taken advantage of the many innovations and modernizations available to them from both AWS and Lemongrass. None of these companies have just ‘lifted and shifted.’ Each of them has implemented technical transformation options that deliver multiple benefits. For example, architecting for zero downtime unlocks access to substantial cost & operational improvements.
Special Ingredient Number One: Automation
As with every recipe for success, there’s always one or two special ingredients. For Lemongrass’s customers, the first special ingredient is Automation. We aim to automate all that we do for our customers and have built an extensive automation platform to migrate and operate SAP workloads on AWS, called Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP). Used by Lemongrass and its customers, LCP’s feature sets cover ‘Discover & Migrate’, ‘Build & Operate’ and ‘Collaborate, Govern & Secure’. As an “Automation First” organization, we know it’s the real enabler for driving SAP price reduction, from reducing your landscape size because you can now build systems on demand (Cattle vs Pets concept), to automating repetitive tasks. If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks in your SAP administration, invest the effort to automate them and the ROI will follow right along. Typically, the cost of maintaining SAP workloads on AWS can deliver significant savings to the business over several years. This just keeps improving as the automation gets better and better.
Special Ingredient Number Two: Innovation
The second special ingredient is Innovation. Innovations from both AWS and Lemongrass are facilitating our ability to drive either additional business benefit and/or cost reduction for our customers, month over month. No company or IT solutions landscape stands still, so to achieve continuous improvement (or transformation) and its associated business value, it’s essential to continue innovating as part of “Business as Usual.”. With AWS releasing over 1200 innovation updates last year, in addition to multiple price discounts, there is always something new. Every morning you wake up there are likely to be 3+ new things you can do that didn’t exist the previous day!
If you would like to find out more about the business value you could achieve by migrating and operating your SAP workloads on AWS with Lemongrass, Lemongrass experts have recently recorded a webinar (40 mins) covering our 5 Critical Success Factors for generating additional business value with SAP on AWS, as well as key areas where innovation & proactivity are rapidly improving operational performance.
Register here: Substantial Cost Savings with SAP on AWS webinar
Contact us directly at info@lemongrasscloud.com for further information.
