Accenture boosts SAP HANA agility and performance by migrating to Azure

Move faster with the cloud

Businesses and governments across the globe look to Accenture to help them keep pace with a world that’s changing at an astonishing rate. Accenture is a professional services company that provides a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology, and operations. With approximately 442,000 employees serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture partners with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500.

To help its clients transform and move faster, Accenture must do the same. A few years ago, the company launched a major digital transformation to adopt a next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to gain the scalability, speed, agility, analytics, and performance needed to meet future growth.

As part of the transformation, Accenture adopted a cloud-only datacenter strategy for all new business applications. Through a combination of public cloud providers and software as a service (SaaS) vendors, the IT organization at Accenture aims to either buy cloud-based applications or write and run its own software exclusively in the cloud.

“Our business continues to evolve to meet client needs,” says Daniel Kirner, Managing Director of Internal IT Operations and SAP Strategy at Accenture. “We’re moving into more diverse businesses, the economic environment is changing faster, and technology is changing faster. Because of all that change on the business side, IT needs to react faster.”

Kirner’s organization is working toward the long-term goal of transferring resources from infrastructure management to development of platform as a service (PaaS) and other cloud capabilities. This will allow the reallocation of resources to development work, which will deliver more value back to the business. “The opportunities to operate with increased flexibility and agility in the cloud will lead to increased speed, productivity, and innovation—and that’s where the lasting business benefits lie,” Kirner says.

Go fast and go big

Accenture charted an aggressive three-year journey to the cloud. Its goal was to have 50 percent of its applications in the cloud within the first year. Through rigorous efforts of getting internal business teams onboard and developing a cloud migration blueprint, Accenture began migrating complex applications to the cloud with great precision and speed.

The IT team migrated and provisioned new virtual machines (VMs) at a pace of approximately 250 a month, resulting in a total of 4,500 VMs moved to the cloud over a period of 18 months. Today, about 90 percent of the way through its journey, Accenture has moved nearly 80 percent of its 13,000 VMs into the cloud, with the goal of having 90 percent in the cloud by the end of 2018.

Azure is “the place to be” for SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA

As mentioned earlier, Accenture has a multi-cloud strategy for risk mitigation reasons and selects cloud solutions based on cloud maturity for various workloads. When it came time to migrate a critical application, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), running on SAP HANA, Accenture chose Microsoft Azure.

“For SAP BW on HANA, Azure has premier capabilities to operate at scale—our SAP BW on HANA capabilities work flawlessly in Azure,” Kirner says.

Included in those Azure premier capabilities are SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances, purpose-built infrastructure for SAP HANA that runs on bare-metal hardware and provides extra scale. The server hardware is embedded in larger stamps that contain compute, networking, and storage infrastructure, all of which is certified for SAP HANA tailored datacenter integration (TDI).

“We were very impressed with Azure application and network architectures—the VMs, storage, high availability options, backups, and support for disaster recovery,” says Abdel Altabarani, SAP Finance Technology Senior Manager at Accenture. “But we were most impressed with the capacity elasticity that gives us the ability to scale up and down. We are looking forward to the Azure Virtual Machines M-Series, which will give us the opportunity to run our SAP S/4HANA on Azure.”

Migrate SAP BW to Azure in just six months

Accenture, the Microsoft Azure team, and SAP partnered to migrate Accenture’s 7-terabyte SAP BW to SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances in just six months. There were three main steps:

• Migrate SAP BW from an on-premises datacenter to Azure
• Migrate Accenture enterprise database from Microsoft SQL Server to SAP HANA with Unicode conversion
• Perform two application upgrades, to SAP BW 7.5 and to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) 10.1

The Accenture team consisted of its internal IT organization, the Accenture Advanced Technology Centers, and the Accenture SAP Cloud Center of Excellence. In addition, to ensure business outcomes were met, business teams were also involved to conduct testing.

With no precedent, every aspect of the solution required innovation. Accenture, Microsoft, and SAP engaged in extensive workshops and design sessions. The companies jointly designed and implemented the three primary pillars required to deploy the solution: execution architecture, operations architecture, and the operations framework. The work included addressing critical items, such as disaster recovery, high availability, data encryption, Azure ticket management, scalability, and network performance. The result was a highly tuned platform that supports Accenture business needs.

Accenture performed iterative test cycles, simulating three full business month-end close cycles while continuously tuning the environment. For the actual production migration to SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances, the team executed a carefully orchestrated cutover, which finished according to plan with minimal business disruption.

“We appreciated the innovation and partnership that the Microsoft Azure team provided during the project,” says Anand Raval, Digital Senior Manager of SAP Analytics at Accenture. “From senior leadership to the engineering teams, our goals were in alignment. The team worked with us on all aspects of the technical and operations architectures to ensure that we could meet the business needs of Accenture. The Azure engineers also played a critical role in stabilizing the solution once we went live.”

In addition to the 32 SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances servers, Accenture uses about 150 Azure Virtual Machines DS-Series to run the SAP application layer. Currently, Accenture runs S/4HANA on-premises and is assessing migrating to Azure Virtual Machines M-Series in the future. SAP BW on HANA connects to the on-premises SAP S/4 system using Azure ExpressRoute.

“In this hybrid landscape, on-premises and cloud environments integrate seamlessly,” Kirner says. “Long term, we’re assessing running our on-premises SAP modules in Azure.”

Deliver faster

Since migrating SAP BW to Azure, Accenture has seen a five-week reduction in time to deliver new SAP HANA environments. Accenture is also using Azure to do functional testing as an extension of its on-premises SAP S/4HANA environment, greatly improving testing and release management across the board with SAP.

“We’re an evolving business and constantly have new IT requirements,” says Raval. “In the past, we would get a business request but couldn’t deliver an environment because we didn’t have the hardware. With Azure, we’ve greatly streamlined the infrastructure deployment process. IT is no longer an obstacle to the business.”

Improve reliability and performance

During high-load periods, such as end-of-quarter reporting, Accenture has seen zero downtime. Further, the company has seen a 38 percent performance improvement on month-end close processing, a 50 percent increase in the ability to scale, and a 70 percent improvement in broadcasting data to downstream applications.

“With Azure, we can deliver and run business needs, faster, with higher quality,” Kirner says. “We transferred a global financial reporting system to Azure, and it was invisible to our business users. They see their business reporting and analytics when they need it—with high quality. In addition, we are positioned for future business growth.”

Reduce costs

Using Azure also creates cost efficiencies, as Accenture pays only for resources consumed. Applications request VMs and storage on demand, so instead of overestimating to create large contingencies, teams can react and adjust to real-life circumstances to proactively and aggressively avoid unnecessary costs.

Specifically, Accenture has reduced the standard uptime schedules for nonproduction servers and begun steps toward self-service resource provisioning. Similarly, teams actively manage the size of their Azure Virtual Machines, and the Accenture cloud team now has the historical data needed to recommend optimal server sizes every month to further increase efficiencies.

Lead by example, keep innovating

From its own transformation, Accenture has created a detailed cloud migration blueprint that it’s using to migrate clients to the cloud. “Clearly, we want to be a showcase for new technology, to drink our own champagne, so to speak,” Kirner says. “We implement new technologies both to operate our own business as effectively and efficiently as possible and to show clients that these technologies can be available for other Fortune 500 companies. We were one of the first to run such a large SAP HANA estate in Azure, and from our lessons learned and architectural decisions, we’ve created a complete playbook for our clients.”

Accenture is assessing moving SAP Solution Manager to Azure in addition to its on-premises S/4HANA environment.

“We will continue to evolve in Azure, looking to take advantage of new services such as the M-Series Virtual Machines as they become available,” says Kirner. “Moving to Azure delivered on the business benefits of agility, reliability, performance, and reduced cost—capabilities that will support our growth for years to come.”

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