Leading Manufacturer: Lift-and-Shift Platform Migration from SAP BW to Google Cloud Platform

Our Customer is a global leader in water technology products for the home and commercial markets, with annual revenues over $4.9 billion. Their portfolio includes internationally-recognized brands throughout Asia, North America, Europe and Africa.

One of the Customer’s flagship subsidiaries is a leading American plumbing and building products manufacturer specializing in premium home and commercial fixtures, with operations across multiple continents and over twenty percent market share. They were facing longstanding challenges with their legacy system, including scalability limitations that hindered essential data analytics and business intelligence (BI) reporting. This lack of dynamic scalability within their existing on-premise SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) data warehouse meant users struggled to add new data sources across various business functions.

The company sought to establish a cloud-based, scalable infrastructure to integrate diverse data types seamlessly and enable real-time analytics. The goal was to build a more robust, flexible environment and gain a unified, logical view of its business data across all entities to support organization-wide analytics and reporting needs. The decision was made to replatform, or “lift-and-shift,” the company's on-premise SAP enterprise data warehouse intact to an appropriate cloud platform to resolve these issues and gain on-demand access to cloud-native capabilities and security.

Project objectives included elimination of infrastructure and licensing expenses and optimization of cost and operational efficiencies. Having decided on a cloud migration to enhance performance of their SAP BW environment, applications, database and supporting components, after analyzing their current and future needs, the Customer opted for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as their destination environment.

The success of this migration hinged upon the choice of a technology partner that had both deep experience in SAP environments and Google Cloud Platform. After reviewing our proven technology and track record in successfully executing cloud migration projects, the Customer selected mLogica.

mLogica deployed a team of cloud migration architects and consultants experienced in the SAP BW environment to migrate the on-premise SAP BW environment, specifically SAP BOBJ and SAP BW/4 HANA, to GCP. Project phases included:

The mLogica team began with a comprehensive assessment of the existing SAP applications, databases and data to analyze all interdependencies, risk factors and the migration viability of all components. Potential challenges and risks were assessed and defined use cases were discussed with the Customer to guide the migration methodology and roadmap.

The mLogica team executed the migration, cutover and deployment of the SAP BW applications, databases and data into the GCP environment. Since this was a "lift-and-shift" migration, no changes were made to the code structure, features or functions of the applications, preserving their underlying architecture, functionalities and external behavior on the new GCP platform.

After configuring and optimizing parameters for the operating system, applications and storage for SAP BOBJ, SAP BW/4 HANA and SAP HANA, our team provisioned and deployed the Customer’s SAP BW environment on GCP while also creating backups. We delivered development, quality assurance (QAS) and production environments, fulfilling the business’s requirements for different tiers of their new cloud landscape.

Rigorous testing was conducted to validate all migrated components. Post-migration, reports of any potential defects were provided by the Customer. The mLogica team triaged each based on criticality and, validating them in the source system and the destination cloud platform. The results were matched in both environments, meeting all required performance benchmarks.

This migration of the existing SAP BW system to Google Cloud Platform provided numerous business benefits for our Customer, offering them new dynamic scalability and advanced cloud-native tools. Integrating their system with GCP has enabled higher performance thresholds, sharply decreased bottlenecks and lower latency and costs.

This initiative also allows them to leverage advanced data analytics and business intelligence reporting that has resulted in faster, more accurate and timely decision-making. GCP’s auto-scaling feature allows seamless resource adjustment in response to workload fluctuations, ensuring both cost efficiency and uninterrupted client support during demand spikes. In addition, the project has delivered substantial savings in CAPEX and OPEX costs and new financial flexibility to invest in technical innovation and product development.

This also provided key benefits for the business's parent company, ensuring that its flagship American brand was able to leverage all data effectively and enhance reporting.

Cloud migration is increasingly vital for organizations looking to enhance system performance, operational flexibility, dynamic scalability and resource optimization. However, an initiative of this magnitude requires expert understanding of all potential challenges and experienced teams that can proactively mitigate these risks.

This project's success highlights the mLogica team’s technical skillset and experience in both SAP and GCP technologies. Effective collaboration between our cloud migration and technical teams and the Customer was pivotal in ensuring a time- and cost-efficient transition to GCP.