Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, recently announced that Siemens Smart Infrastructure, a business of the Siemens AG group focusing on energy distribution and intelligent buildings, is moving its SAP infrastructure to AWS. The business will migrate more than 20 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, based on SAP HANA, to AWS before the end of 2021.
These systems support business-critical processes in areas such as manufacturing, operations, and sales across different business units including Building Products, Electrical Products, Digital Grid, and Distribution Systems. Moving these workloads to AWS will enable Siemens Smart Infrastructure to significantly shorten hardware refresh cycles, increase agility to test and deploy new systems, and provide the foundation for the company’s future transformation using SAP S/4HANA technology. This is the first migration of production-scale SAP systems to the cloud across the Siemens AG group, with Siemens Smart Infrastructure forecasting significant cost savings over the course of the next three years.
Siemens Smart Infrastructure's migration of SAP to AWS is a core part of the company's strategic plan to accelerate the modernization of its business. Working alongside AWS as its preferred cloud provider for SAP, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will be able to integrate its SAP environments with a wide range of advanced AWS technologies, in areas such as analytics and machine learning, to uncover new business value and drive innovation. All of this was not previously possible for Siemens Smart Infrastructure, as its SAP systems were siloed off from the rest of its business in co-located data centers.
As the foundation of its new cloud-based SAP environment, Siemens Smart Infrastructure will use a broad range of AWS' Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, including memory-optimized R5 instances for real-time big data analytics workloads, as well as X1 and X1e instances built for high-performance databases, in-memory databases, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications.
Siemens Smart Infrastructure and AWS started their successful collaboration five years ago, when Siemens began moving core parts of its digital building technology to the cloud. The company is currently using a number of other advanced AWS services including Amazon Aurora (a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud), AWS Lambda (AWS' serverless compute service), and Amazon Neptune (a fully managed graph database service).
"2020 has been a year like no other, yet AWS has been a dedicated and trustworthy partner on our digital transformation journey," said Sébastien Bey, CIO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure. "Our SAP environments are the backbone of our organization; by moving these foundational pieces of the Siemens Smart Infrastructure business to AWS, we are not only reducing costs and upgrading the service we provide to our internal businesses, but also fundamentally changing the way we use technology to transform our business, innovate, and deliver value."
"AWS is thrilled to be working alongside a forward-thinking and customer-centric business like Siemens Smart Infrastructure as it connects buildings and cities with its advanced technologies. AWS delivers proven performance, insights, and agility to advance Siemens Smart Infrastructure's mission of helping customers around the world run their infrastructure in the most efficient and sustainable way and ensure our long-term future on this planet," said Carla Stratfold, vice president of AWS Global Verticals and Strategic Accounts. "Organizations around the world trust their most essential SAP workloads to AWS because of our unmatched track record, breadth and depth of services, and vibrant partner community that helps them to transform their SAP landscapes."
