Vodafone to move SAP S/4HANA ERP system to Google Cloud
- Reference: 1666007791
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/10/17/vodafone_opts_to_move_sap/
- Source link:
In a statement released today, the global telecoms provider, which boasts revenue of around €45.58 billion (c $44 billion), said it had been running on on-premises for 15 years, "during which time it has significantly grown in size, making this one of the largest and one of the most complex SAP migrations in EMEA."
The company is in the top five mobile network operators in the world, and is the biggest outside of India and China, with 300 mobile subscribers across 21 countries.
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"By integrating its cloud-hosted SAP system to its data ocean running on Google Cloud, Vodafone aims to introduce operational efficiency and drive innovation," the company said.
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Vodafone is migrating its SAP system, the backbone for its financial, procurement and HR services, to Google Cloud.
Until November 2019, Vodafone was running single-instance SAP Enterprise Core Components (ECC) but managed to upgrade its on-prem system to the five SAP S/4 Hana instances worldwide in a programme which took around 18 months, [4]according to reports .
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At the time, CIO Ignacio Garcia said the company would "eventually" move its S/4HANA instances to the cloud, in line with a broad strategy for corporate data.
According to the corporation, Vodafone will launch "EVO2CLOUD" to migrate its financial, procurement and HR services SAP S/4HANA workloads to Google Cloud. "It's the backbone of ... internal and external operations. High availability and reliability are fundamental requirements to ensure smooth operation with minimal downtime. Moreover, hosting SAP on Google Cloud is a foundation for digital innovation and maintaining cybersecurity," the company said.
Vodafone said it foresees a "step change in its operating model" because of its ability to use Google Cloud M1 and M2 infrastructure on demand.
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According to Google, the M1 machine series has up to 4TB of memory, while the M2 machine series has up to 12TB of memory. "These machine series are well-suited for large in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, as well as in-memory data analytics workloads," [7]Google said in a post .
Vodafone also said it would increase its release-cycle frequency for its SAP software from bi-annual rollouts to weekly ones, increasing agility and introducing features faster. It did not indicate when it expected to complete the migration.
Vodafone and Google offered scant detail on how they intended to proceed with the migration but the size of the challenge will depend on the extent of customisation it made or replicated from ECC when moving to S/4HANA.
Experts have warned that users will have to wave goodbye to customizations as they move ERP to the cloud.
[8]European carriers again call for Big Tech to fund network builds
[9]Nokia Bell Labs identifies six key technologies for 6G
[10]SAP's German-speaking heartlands still struggling with ERP vendor's cloud vision
[11]Vodafone picks Google for MLops project that self-serves models in minutes
For example, [12]in 2021 CEO of the Americas' SAP Users' group (ASUG) Geoff Scott warned SAP users there was much more to consider than just software and IT infrastructure.
"The traditional on-prem, highly customised ERP solution, absolutely, positively has to give way to a more SaaS-based ERP solution," he said.
"You need to spend some careful time looking at how your business is operating and perhaps the way you've operated a certain business process five years ago is not the way you want to operate it today. Thinking about how your business is operating in a post-pandemic world, there could be a lot of opportunities for you to take a look at," Scott said.
Vodafone's move is in line with its decision to use Google as the main provider for its [13]analytics platform using BigQuery and other data products hosted on Google cloud.
It's worth noting though that Vodafone also remains a customer of Teradata and Oracle in its enterprise analytics stack. ®
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[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y018GadUjYSNl@NOT8LwMwAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y018GadUjYSNl@NOT8LwMwAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487598/Vodafone-builds-smart-enterprise-on-SAP-S-4-Hana
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y018GadUjYSNl@NOT8LwMwAAAJU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/memory-optimized-machines
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/27/etno_digital_infrastructure_sustainability/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/11/nokia_german_6g/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/dsag_sap_user_conference/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/vodafone_google_cloud/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/04/sap_user_survey/
[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAitKERcDPU
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Ah yes, let's just hand it to them on a plate
I'd agree that loss of data sovereignty is a potentially catastrophic risk. But, thus far, there is not the slightest indication of Google doing anything with customer data on its compute engine. It doesn't really need to: the costs of getting the data back make it very much a one way bet.
Re: Ah yes, let's just hand it to them on a plate
Google using their headline customers' customer's data would sink them reputationally and financially.
These contracts are usually worth multi billion $, so do you really believe that the people doing these deals, along with the countless lawyers involved won't include hefty penalties for even minor cock ups?
They will be making far more in profit from this than they would from your weird history of 'Google and M$ are shit haha'.
Nice work if you can get it
Sometime, these mega-projects read as though a bunch of techies are just building their CVs. First do the migration to on-prem. Then to cloud. All that lovely experience. Next up, move it all to a competing product.
'Cos Agile.
Re: Nice work if you can get it
Nah.
Seagull management. Someone in the C-Suite has managed to eye up Capex vs Opex and can hide the true cost in enough spreadsheets so it boosts his/her chances of another big bonus. This won't have been driven by the techies.
Frequency of updates
Vodafone also said it would increase its release-cycle frequency for its SAP software from bi-annual rollouts to weekly ones, increasing agility and introducing features faster.
Spoken like someone who has had little or no experience of enterprise software where change is (rightly in most contexts) viewed as the enemy.
SAP is a beast and has pernicious licensing but its history in the enterprise means, that once you've spent all the millions customising it, it will generally do what you want and then keep doing it. Just don't try thinking you can change anything. I don't even need to say quickly, it doesn't exist in the SAP approved dictionary.
However, the biggest problem with this is the idea that things might end up being cheaper. That's only ever going to happen if you figure out a way to get off SAP. Otherwise, any savings you may will soon be mopped up by new licensing conditions.
It's always interesting to see telcos instead of becoming cloud powerhouses themselves...
... send everything to external supplier and reduce themselves more and more to SIM resellers and marketing departments. But hey, this is the company the previous CEO greatest achievement was to move offices inside London so management had more expensive restaurants and clubs nearby, His stint as Italian minister is over - do you want him back?
A book seller could become the largest cloud provider - "mighty" telcos made so much money investing so little they keep on dreaming about making easy money with flashy ads promising the latest mobe - let see how long it will last.
They’re HUUUUUGE.
300 mobile subscribers in 21 countries !
Re: They’re HUUUUUGE.
Yeah they could run that on a 1-2-3 spreadsheet like it’s 1995. That’d save a bunch of money and hassle over using SAP!
Re: They’re HUUUUUGE.
I was going to say the same. Yeah huge! All 300!
Can we get to the nitty-gritty behind these decisions?
"The traditional on-prem, highly customised ERP solution, absolutely, positively has to give way to a more SaaS-based ERP solution," he said.
"... perhaps the way you've operated ... five years ago is not the way you want to operate it today ... How your business is operating in a post-pandemic world, there could be a lot of opportunities" Scott said.
So what - at a technology level - is different to running infrastructure on prem vs in the cloud that was vastly different 5 years ago? What does the post-pandemic world have to do with any of this?
That stock response from Scott seems to be the kind of bullshit cloud vendors will have sold to him on the basis that "the cloud" is the answer to everything: costs less, is easier to maintain, it's more secure**.. and also has zero migration costs and risks. Anyone competent knows this is absolute nonsense. Moving services to the cloud does not result in automatic benefits, but cloud vendors seem keen to tell everyone otherwise.
So please enlighten me as to what, other than the hardware not being on their premises and the pricing model, is actually any different to what they were doing 5 years ago?
** Re security: "hosting SAP on Google Cloud is a foundation for digital innovation and maintaining cybersecurity"
Except it doesn't result in any cybersecurity benefits, lest we forget that GCP instances are unmanaged .
Not Convinced
Wondering what the actual business drivers is here. Not just because the C-heads have been shown the latest snake oil. If I was running something that business critical, I’d want hardware I can kick and people to fix it. Yes cloud is sold as resilient etc but I’d want to be shown inter-centre failover working first before even thinking about the merits of spending huge amounts of cash on it.
Ah yes, let's just hand it to them on a plate
All that lovely jucy customer data, now available without any effort to a company known to be very careful when acquiring personal data and which has no links to the US, no siree.