After many years of operating its enterprise applications from an outsourced, on-premises datacentre, MMG's infrastructure became increasingly complex, difficult and expensive to manage. With its legacy platform rapidly approaching "end-of-life," finding a new solution became an urgent priority.

As explained by Todd Scholes, the company’s SAP platform architect, MMG saw Microsoft Azure as a powerful way to modernise IT operations and reduce hardware and operational costs.

After meeting with Avanade’s CEO, MMG concluded that Avanade complemented Acclimation’s SAP expertise with the perfect mix of enterprise-scale Microsoft experience and personalised, customer-focused service.

Avanade designed, delivered and managed the Azure infrastructure for the multi-staged migration of SAP, while local partner Acclimation built the migration plan. Following a series of “dress rehearsals,” we performed OS/DB migrations of the current SAP landscape while moving into Azure and also migrated the SAP ECC system onto SAP’s in-memory database, HANA.

Our measured, staged approach included sandboxing, extensive QA testing and end-user feedback at every stage of the project that ensured errors were caught early and weeded out before production. And while this intensive process caused “some pain upfront,” it ultimately led to “big payoffs in the end,” according to Scholes.

From an end-user perspective, the new environment is also paying off. Scholes said the combination of the Azure and HANA migration has business users reporting that SAP runs “noticeably quicker.” With common transactions completing 25% to 30% faster and many data extracts that feed business warehouse (BW) reports taking just minutes instead of hours, the solution is significantly speeding up the work of end users.