Cloud-native SAP operation in the Otto Group

Until recently, all SAP systems managed by Otto Group IT were operated by a service company in a traditional data centre – a classic outsourcing model in which all SAP operations tasks and the SAP core platform were outsourced to the external service provider.

Operation was stable and also satisfactory. We didn’t have to worry about anything and had fully functional SAP systems on which our customers (the Otto Group specialist departments and Group companies) could map out their managed business processes (finance, controlling, billing, procurement and merchandise management, personnel management, and much more).

The downside of this operating model was that system landscape modifications could not be carried out quickly and flexibly, and the set-up of new systems often took too long. 
On top of this, over the last few years in the world of SAP there has been a major change from the old SAP ECC 6.0 software (also known as R/3) to the more modern SAP S/4HANA. As the name suggests, S/4HANA is based on the in-memory database SAP HANA. For installation and operation you need SAP-certified hardware (servers), which are very expensive to purchase.

The desire for cheaper certified hardware to operate SAP S/4HANA, combined with our wish for a higher speed of change and thus integration in our agile software development, gave my colleague Stefan and me the idea to radically rethink our SAP operating model.

Since then, our goal has been to operate all SAP systems managed by Otto Group IT 100% cloud-natively on modern Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources provided by the Google Cloud Platform. In Google we have found a partner where we can simply lease the resources required for SAP operation cost-effectively and flexibly