September 16, 2022 By Ananth Narasimhan 4 min read

With unprecedented global and market challenges, IT leaders need to transform their businesses with the latest innovations on a proven, secure, resilient and sustainable foundation.

According to a C-suite executive survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value, 97% of enterprises have either piloted, implemented or integrated cloud technology in their operations. Yet, while enterprises have successfully migrated peripheral, smaller workloads, most mission-critical workloads are still on-premises.

CIOs have concerns around moving data to the cloud, as the migration process can be resource and cost-intensive. C-suite executives also face concerns around concentration risk. If everything is on the same cloud and something happens (for example, a data breach), exposure can be significant. And regulations for regulated industries can be complex and stringent. 

Notwithstanding, running mission-critical applications on a hybrid cloud infrastructure provides myriad benefits, including increasing organizations’ flexibility and agility, providing dynamic capacity and faster time to market. A modern infrastructure designed with a hybrid cloud strategy allows you to access and modernize mission-critical applications and data and respond quickly to changing market and customer demands. With an open hybrid cloud approach, you can get a trusted partner to help with your cloud migration transformation end-to-end.

Let’s look at three companies that successfully migrated their mission-critical workloads. You’ll learn why cloud migration was a must if they were going to speed up business opportunities and processes. You’ll also learn how each client empowered their hybrid cloud future with IBM and SAP.

How Abou Ghaly Motors delivered financial reports 99% faster

Abou Ghaly Motors (AGM) is leading the change in Egypt with integrated mobility solutions for individual corporations. Several years ago, AGM deployed SAP ERP to manage CRM-based sales, services and marketing practices. However, AGM embarked on a digital transformation and needed to move its SAP solutions to a cloud platform. Unfortunately, infrastructure connectivity and scalability couldn’t keep pace with the integration of new capabilities.

In sourcing a cloud platform, AGM decided on IBM Cloud to provide the efficiency, scalability and security-rich features to support AGM’s enterprise-scale SAP workloads. Running on IBM Cloud and supported by the SAP HANA database, corporate accounts can now execute complex financial reports up to 99% faster. Branch and service-center employees can access customer data in seconds, and IT teams can focus on strategic initiatives rather than managing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure.

AGM was able to respond to market changes quickly with real-time insights by modernizing core ERP to SAP S/4HANA. “Moving to IBM Cloud has helped AGM fast-track our digital transformation,” says Khaled Maddah, Innovation and Technology Director at AGM. “This migration was an important milestone in our journey that, with the support of IBM and SAP, has been met.”

How Harry Rosen cut web platform development time in half

Harry Rosen Inc., a made-to-measure menswear store in Toronto’s Cabbagetown, opened in 1954 and has since expanded to include 15 retail stores, 3 outlets and a robust e-commerce platform. By 2015, the retailer had outgrown its existing IT infrastructure and undertook a digital transformation of their business. Aiming to keep the customer at the center of its business evolution, the Harry Rosen company collaborated with IBM Garage™.

The company chose IBM Cloud for VMware Solution as its new public cloud infrastructure. Together, the solution provided a flexible IT environment that enables Harry Rosen to swiftly adapt to shifting market demands in an increasingly fast-paced world. Since adopting IBM Cloud, Harry Rosen has increased website performance by 100x and shortened the time needed to develop a new website platform by 50% using IBM technology.

“One of the advantages of IBM Cloud is that we no longer have to support the hardware in our IT infrastructure — we know our data is secure and accessible. IBM has provided that level of confidence,” says Steve Warriner, Chief Technology Officer at Harry Rosen Inc.

How Mondi Group boosted application performance by 20%

Headquartered in London, England, Mondi Group is a multinational packaging and paper group employing 26,000 people at 100 production sites across more than 30 countries in Europe, Eurasia, North America and Southern Africa. The demand for last-mile delivery packaging has soared alongside the huge growth of home shopping. To capture the opportunities while meeting its rigorous sustainability targets, Mondi Group engaged IBM to help move to the next-generation ERP SAP S/4HANA hosted on resilient, high-performance IBM® Power Systems servers with IBM FlashSystem® storage.

The new solutions will allow Mondi to unlock new efficiencies even as business volumes grow, helping to meet its sustainability goals. Rainer Steffl, CIO at Mondi Group, says, “In partnership with IBM, we converted 40 factories across 15 countries to the cutting-edge SAP S/4HANA platform — and the move went perfectly. Although our journey is just beginning, we’ve already boosted end-user application performance by 20%, empowering our employees to work more effectively than ever. We see that IBM Power Systems servers and IBM FlashSystem storage provide the perfect platform for demanding new analytics workloads in SAP S/4HANA, which will help us enhance the efficiency and sustainability of our operations in the future.”

A new way to migrate mission-critical workloads

Many organizations rely on SAP ERP workloads to run front-office and back-office operations. A key value driver for them to move to SAP’s flagship ERP offering — S/4HANA — is to take advantage of the cloud deployment model. A cloud-based ERP solution allows organizations to rapidly adapt their operations to changing market conditions. More than 70% of organizations are planning to deploy S/4HANA on the cloud.

Moving to S/4HANA is a complex transformation, and the cloud platform on which it is deployed impacts the time-to-value, availability and the ability to continuously innovate. In 2021, IDC surveyed the organizations that moved to S/4HANA and found that clients who deployed on the IBM Cloud platform required the least amount of time to migrate all hyperscalers [1]. A key reason for this is that IBM offers the widest portfolio of SAP-certified infrastructure options. Whether the SAP workloads are currently deployed on IBM Power® servers or Intel servers, IBM offers infrastructure options that work with their current architecture and enable growth.

IBM is also the first cloud provider to offer infrastructure, business transformation and application management services as part of RISE with SAP. This helps simplify and accelerate the move to SAP Cloud ERP. Learn how IBM delivers strategic, business, and technological value with RISE with SAP.

Why act now?

If your organization is one of the many still relying on legacy SAP systems, consider planning your migration now. The IBM Cloud platform provides comprehensive solutions to support enterprise-scale workloads with the broadest portfolio of SAP-certified infrastructure, including bare metal and VMware solutions. IBM Consulting can help your organization plan its migration, focus its resources and modernize its cloud platform with minimum disruption.

[1] IDC Special Report: Infrastructure Adoption Trends for SAP HANA and S/4HANA 2021 Part 2: Market Trends/Landscape, Dec 2021,Doc # US48416021

Was this article helpful?
YesNo

More from Cloud

How a US bank modernized its mainframe applications with IBM Consulting and Microsoft Azure

9 min read - As organizations strive to stay ahead of the curve in today's fast-paced digital landscape, mainframe application modernization has emerged as a critical component of any digital transformation strategy. In this blog, we'll discuss the example of a fictional US bank which embarked on a journey to modernize its mainframe applications. This strategic project has helped it to transform into a more modern, flexible and agile business. In looking at the ways in which it approached the problem, you’ll gain insights…

IBM and AWS: Driving the next-gen SAP transformation  

5 min read - SAP is the epicenter of business operations for companies around the world. In fact, 77% of the world’s transactional revenue touches an SAP system, and 92% of the Forbes Global 2000 companies use SAP, according to Frost & Sullivan.   Global challenges related to profitability, supply chains and sustainability are creating economic uncertainty for many companies. Modernizing SAP systems and embracing cloud environments like AWS can provide these companies with a real-time view of their business operations, fueling growth and increasing…

Attention new clients: exciting financial incentives for VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud

4 min read - New client specials: Get up to 50% off when you commit to a 1- or 3-year term contract on new VCF-as-a-Service offerings, plus an additional value of up to USD 200K in credits through 30 June 2025 when you migrate your VMware workloads to IBM Cloud®.1 Low starting prices: On-demand VCF-as-a-Service deployments begin under USD 200 per month.2 The IBM Cloud benefit: See the potential for a 201%3 return on investment (ROI) over 3 years with reduced downtime, cost and…

IBM Newsletters

Get our newsletters and topic updates that deliver the latest thought leadership and insights on emerging trends.
Subscribe now More newsletters