ProNovia AG runs SAP on Azure

Challenge

ProNovia AG is a leading Swiss company specialized in the implementation of SAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, and whose core competences lie in consulting, implementation and support during the entire realization of a project. Developing customer-specific PLM Add-ons, ProNovia AG is required to adopt the Best Practices and the overall strategy of SAP when working with the SAP environments of its clients and partners.

Given the continuous demand for innovation, ProNovia AG is constantly looking for ways to increase its flexibility and adaptation to new SAP applications and technological platforms. Approaching the end of the contract lifecycle with its current hosting provider, ProNovia AG took the opportunity to rethink its SAP hosting model.

Solution

With the help of ITPC AG, ProNovia AG appreciated the advantages of moving its SAP systems to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. The results of a series of performance, stability and reliability tests on an SAP IDES-System running on Microsoft Azure, along with an analysis of the cost structure involved in running ProNovia AG’s SAP landscapes on Azure reinforced the decision to move to the Cloud.

“Microsoft Azure gives us the flexibility to quickly adapt the infrastructure to changing requirements. In addition, the current solution is also economically very attractive.“

Christian Gradolf, Member of the Executive Board at ProNovia AG

The migration to Microsoft Azure was planned and conducted by ITPC AG. ITPC AG performed a lift-and-shift migration, which allowed multiple systems to be moved simultaneously and during ongoing operations, without any significant interruption to the business. With this approach, ProNovia AG was able to carry out any development and configuration modifications to the SAP landscapes in parallel to the Azure migration, thereby speeding up the project. As a result, the whole migration project was completed in less than three weeks, deploying the new infrastructure in less than 24 hours and meeting the planned Go-Live deadline in April 2016.

Results

By moving to Azure, ProNovia AG improved the performance of their SAP systems while reducing its hosting costs. On Microsoft Azure, infrastructure and the SAP applications on it are charged per consumption, further reducing the company’s operating expenditure. With the Microsoft Azure Cloud ProNovia AG was able to cut costs by approximately 35% compared with its previous hosted solution.

Azure allows fast and flexible deployment of additional systems on demand, which increases the company’s ability to adopt new technologies and creates room for innovation. ProNovia AG used this advantage in the months immediately following the migration by starting its journey to S/4HANA. Without having to order new hardware, the transformation to the new SAP release was fairly easy, with one system up and working on S/4 [HD1] in the following month, the first of several planned migrations. Thanks to ITPC AG and Microsoft, ProNovia AG is able to easily tackle the upcoming challenges around innovation.

ProNovia AG is a leading Swiss company specialized in the implementation of SAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. Migrating to Microsoft Azure increased the company’s flexibility and performance of SAP environments while reducing 35% of its operating expenditures:

“Microsoft Azure gives us the flexibility to quickly adapt the infrastructure to changing requirements. In addition, the current solution is also economically very attractive. With ITPC and Microsoft Azure we have found the ideal partners. ITPC with its well-founded know-how, both on Microsoft Azure and SAP Basis, handles all our requests in the shortest possible time and to our complete satisfaction.”

Christian Gradolf, Member of the Executive Board at ProNovia AG

Download the full success story as PDF here: ProNovia AG on Azure

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