When asked about the biggest obstacles to implementing their cloud strategy in a recent survey by Foundry, controlling costs was named the number one factor by respondents.1 As the AI era gets into gear, cost control is only going to get harder. According to one study, AI will drive a 20% increase in spending on cloud services this year alone.2 Solving the perennial cloud cost optimisation challenge is therefore more urgent than ever.
For SAP users, one way to mitigate these cost challenges is to run their workloads on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Doing so enables users to get the most from their SAP investments while driving breakthrough efficiencies across the enterprise.
Driving down the TCO of SAP systems
First comes a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership of the SAP portfolio. When moving to the AWS cloud infrastructure, SAP customers realise cost savings from many perspectives, including rightsizing their software landscapes, eliminating hardware refresh costs, and offsetting migration costs by using migration best-practices developed by the hyperscaler.
For example, analysis from IDC suggests that S/4HANA users can unlock value worth an annual average of $11.19 million per interviewed customer by running the ERP suite on AWS.3
According to IDC’s research, this value is achieved in a variety of ways, including optimising spending on infrastructure and licensing and reducing the management and support burden on staff. Additional value is realised through improving data analytics capabilities, bettering ERP performance and capabilities, and increasing agility and flexibility.4
Variously, these factors help lower operational costs, free up time for business-generating activities, increase the impact of operational data, generate revenue, and increase employee productivity levels.5
Unlocking IT team efficiencies
There is also a clear and immediate benefit to IT teams from running SAP on AWS. The highly functional, automated, and consolidated AWS environment enables IT infrastructure teams to shift their focus from day-to-day operational tasks such as patching and troubleshooting to broader, higher-value initiatives, such as AI integration.
What’s more, considerably less time is required of IT to support migrations, deployments, and updates to the business’ ERP environment. Such efficiencies are particularly valuable as a business looks to scale and can help ensure mergers and acquisitions progress smoothly, at pace, and with minimal disruption.
Modernising business processes
A third major benefit of running SAP on AWS relating to cost control, is that the two companies have worked together to develop a set of joint reference architectures (JRAs). These architectures help companies modernise their business processes with AWS and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) services while keeping their core clean. Significantly, the JRAs also help businesses achieve the best time-to-value and lowest total-cost-of-ownership for their SAP deployments.
With the JRAs, organisations can more effectively utilise both SAP and non-SAP data, streamline their enterprise planning, deploy those increasingly essential AI/ML models, and address IoT scenarios using Amazon Monitron.
When it comes to the cloud, understanding true costs is seldom straightforward. Deploying SAP on AWS can bring clarity and drive down expenses, enabling organisations to make the most of new opportunities, including around AI. In short, the marriage of SAP and AWS provides a quick and straightforward way for businesses to lay the foundations for the next phase of their digital journeys without blowing their budgets.
Find out more about SAP on AWS, including performance data, case studies and further information.
1Foundry, Cloud Computing Study 2023, September 2023
2Canalys, Worldwide cloud service spending to grow by 20% in 2024, February 2024
3IDC, Sponsored by AWS, The Business Value of SAP S/4HANA on AWS, August 2023 https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/PTNR_SAP_IDC_Whitepaper_Aug-23.pdf
4Ibid
5Ibid