Siemens Smart Infrastructure, which focuses on energy distribution and intelligent buildings, is moving its SAP infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The business will migrate over 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 to 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/4 Hana technology.

This is the first migration of production-scale SAP systems to the cloud across the Siemens group, with Siemens Smart Infrastructure forecasting significant cost savings over the course of the next three years.

The migration of SAP to AWS is a core part of the company’s plan to accelerate the modernisation 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 AWS technologies, in areas such as analytics and machine learning, to uncover business value and drive innovation.

“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 organisation; 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.”

All this was not previously possible for Siemens, as its SAP systems were siloed off from the rest of the business in co-located data centres.

As the foundation of its new cloud-based SAP environment, Siemens will use a broad range of AWS’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, including memory-optimised 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 collaboration five years ago, when Siemens began moving core parts of its digital building technology to the cloud. The company is using a number of other AWS services including Aurora (a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud), AWS Lambda serverless compute service, and Amazon Neptune managed graph database service.

“AWS is thrilled to be working alongside a forward-thinking and customer-centric business like Siemens Smart Infrastructure as they connect buildings and cities with their advanced technologies,” said Carla Stratfold, AWS vice president. “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. Organisations 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.”