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A coordinated move to the cloud
How Interpublic Group worked with IBM Consulting and AWS to accelerate its data center exit
Interpublic Group (IPG), one of the world’s premier global advertising and marketing services companies, needs a strong infrastructure to sustain its day-to-day operations and workloads. In this instance, the entertainment company was planning to exit its existing on-premises data center in Omaha, Nebraska, and start to move legacy workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS)—including lots of workloads running on VMware already.
With this migration, IPG needed assistance in moving its tricky and complex SAP workloads to AWS and to speed up its data center exit. Having collaborated with IBM on previous projects, IPG looked to IBM Consulting® for its consulting services.
Tasked with understanding IPG’s existing on-premises ecosystem, IBM Consulting proposed a scalable architecture and design that suits the marketing company’s current and future needs. The new structure would also apply a refactor-and-rearchitect approach for IPG’s migration—it would not be a simple lift and shift.
IBM Consulting started with a sandbox migration. To ensure the solution and necessary inputs were ready for the main program migration, IBM Consulting worked in a phased manner throughout the process. The team began migrating on-premises SAP instances (Dev, QA, production, including HA/DR) and supporting the ecosystem of legacy applications onto the AWS cloud.
Simplifying the landscape without sacrificing downtime
As a conglomerate, IPG has its subsidiaries on the same SAP instance while newly acquired companies are continually onboarded on that same instance. Therefore, migrations need to be quick, fast and efficient. IPG books USD 10B of revenue annually on SAP, so even one or two days of downtime is unacceptable for the company.
Within four months, IPG’s two largest SAP servers were migrated and scheduled to run between significant projects to reduce market disruption as business units were going live. The IBM team also captured the required parameters and redesigned and rearchitected a few applications to improve and meet the on-premises performance criteria for scheduled and user-submitted jobs and operational reports on performance and infrastructure needs using AWS native toolsets.
Throughout the program, IBM Consulting met and exceeded acceptance criteria for applications, improving performance and executions by 20% on the new infrastructure. By moving to AWS Cloud, IPG started to leverage AWS native services that are enabling their digital transformation at scale.
IPG (link resides outside of ibm.com), founded in New York City as McCann-Erickson, is a global marketing solutions provider. With approximately 57,000 employees in all major world markets, its companies specialize in advertising, digital marketing, communications planning, media, public relations and specialty marketing.
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Produced in the United States of America, October 2024.
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