Corporate splits present new beginnings. With new beginnings come the impetus for transformation. This was the case for a leading lifestyle brand collective based in New York. The company in question designs, produces, and builds brands of distinction. During its split from a brand management company, the New York based company undertook an IT Transformation of its complete infrastructure, SAP landscape and other applications. The vehicle of choice for their transformation was Microsoft Azure.

As a new business entity and a lifestyle brand collective that prides itself on being brand, business, and customer centric, the New York based company needed a robust infrastructure to support its day-to-day business processes. Microsoft Azure gave the company the availability, security, and scalability it required to meet its infrastructure needs. Microsoft’s strong partnership with SAP was another factor that made Azure the most viable option for the company’s SAP cloud transformation. With its SAP systems on Azure, the company is now operating with more efficiency, agility and flexibility.

Selecting the Ideal Cloud Service Provider

After the decision was made to migrate its SAP systems to Azure, the New York based company needed to make its second most critical selection: the cloud service provider executing the migration. Going into the selection process, the two most important criteria for the company was cost-effectiveness and a proven track record. Wharfedale Technologies met both of these criteria with flying colors.

Wharfedale Technologies is a strategic Microsoft Gold Partner that specializes in cloud migrations and managed services for SAP workloads on Azure. The New York based company was able to validate Wharfedale’s track record through Wharfedale’s customer references and testimonials. Wharfedale also proved to be the most cost-effective option due to Wharfedale’s Zero Dollar Down Subscription Model.

The Zero Dollar Down Subscription Model is a package of Wharfedale SAP cloud migration offering and managed services. With it, organizations can migrate their SAP systems to Azure with no upfront costs.

Basing the Zero Dollar Down solution around Azure gives Wharfedale the competitive advantage against other vendors because it provides customers with a significant amount of technical and business value. Customers who opt-in to this offering can migrate their SAP systems to Azure with the expert guidance of a Microsoft Gold partner and the readily available support of Microsoft - a strategic certified SAP partner - all while saving costs with no upfront investment.  

Navigating the Migration Journey

The New York based company commissioned Wharfedale to execute an OS/DB migration for its SAP systems and applications running Oracle on Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Wharfedale was also tasked with rebuilding the company’s SAP application servers and central instances on Azure and migrating the company’s on-premise SAP BW on HANA to Azure.

Wharfedale used its 74 factor SAP Transformation Methodology to help the company facilitate a seamless migration of its SAP landscape to Azure. As with all migrations, Wharfedale’s team ran into some challenges along the way. One of the initial challenges was securing the optimal amount of bandwidth needed to ensure a minimal downtime migration. Organizations migrating applications to the cloud often underestimate the bandwidth needed to facilitate a seamless cloud migration and this was the case with the New York based company.

After getting an estimate of the required bandwidth for the migration, Wharfedale worked in tandem with the company’s network team and the Microsoft Azure team to optimize the company’s data throughput.

To minimize migration downtime, Wharfedale conducted four mock runs in which it performed process optimization, performance tuning, and data archival. During the final mock run Wharfedale migrated some non-transactional production systems ahead to reduce overhead during cutover. Through these measures, Wharfedale was able to migrate over 100 servers to Azure with only 36 hours of downtime.

Attention to Detail

In addition to migrating the company’s SAP systems to Azure, Wharfedale took on the added challenge of interfacing EDI with the company’s ERP system. As a company undergoing a split, it was important that all their data was transmitted from its parent company to the new SAP landscape in Azure.

Wharfedale stepped in and seamlessly executed the EDI interface integration by performing mock runs and using mock systems to perform the migration post-processing work. Before production cutover, Wharfedale exported the EDI configuration from the mock systems and then imported it into the company’s ERP system after production cutover.

These processes were executed efficiently by leveraging Azure’s resource scalability, which enhanced the export/import process. With the successful EDI interface integration executed by Wharfedale, the New York based company was officially separated from its parent company.

A New Beginning

The primary goal of the New York based company was to facilitate a seamless split from its parent company through a migration of its SAP landscape to Azure.  Wharfedale helped the company execute the migration to Azure with minimal disturbance to its business. With its SAP systems on Azure, the company has realized the following benefits:

• Azure guaranteed 99.95% uptime
• Accelerated servicer provisioning to help support business growth
• Reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of SAP landscape

“Wharfedale’s solution enabled the customer to undergo the divestiture process with minimal business disruption, while still taking advantage of the performance benefits and agility provided by Azure for running SAP on HANA and SQL databases in Azure” stated Mahesh Reddy, CTO of Wharfedale Technologies. “The customer is realizing the benefits of deploying their SAP workloads on a hosting platform with improved service reliability, a diverse array of integrations and innovative services.”

As a new business entity, the New York based lifestyle brand collective seized the opportunity to start on the right foot by migrating its SAP systems to Azure. With Azure’s best-in-class cloud infrastructure and ongoing support from Wharfedale Technologies, the company has established the foundation it needs to operate with greater efficiency, availability, and flexibility going forward.

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