THE CHALLENGE
A large energy company focused on the competitive energy and power generation markets created a sap cloud migration program to meet identified cost saving opportunities across the company in response to recent acquisitions. Additionally, the company’s leadership decided to exit their data centers and move to the cloud to cut costs related to data center expenses, resource support costs, and hardware costs.
While there was excitement around cloud migration, there were also hesitations with moving to a large environment—especially for applications that the business depended on 24/7 to conduct operations. To mitigate this risk, the technology team needed to ensure that there would be minimal downtime during migration, and that their application performance would improve once moved to the cloud.
The migration of their SAP applications and databases to Virtustream was one of the larger pieces in the Cloud Migration Program. The company had worked with Sendero on a variety of different projects in the past and trusted Sendero’s experience to lead the project management and coordination activities necessary to complete this effort.
OUR APPROACH
Sendero led a cross-functional, multi-vendor team of over 70 resources made up of the client’s employees from Technology Services and Business areas, other consultants, and the Virtustream team.
One of the key objectives of the project was ensuring a “like-for-like experience” so that users would not notice any difference in application performance and speed. To accomplish this, the team identified the different factors that contributed to the performance of the application and developed an approach to test, validate, and measure the results.
The team first tackled the lower environments, and as each environment migrated to Virtustream, the performance of each factor was compared against the existing on-premise environment. If the comparison yielded a variance outside of the expected range, the team performed an in-depth root cause analysis to identify the problem area. Once the team identified the root cause, they performed a cost/benefit analysis to determine if the root cause was attributable to normal cloud architecture, or if in fact there was an issue to remediate. For the more difficult remediations, the team organized multiple onsite and remote workshops to find solutions.
In addition to the migration efforts, the team also integrated both the client’s and Virtustream’s holistic ITSM systems within ServiceNow for 3 primary ticket types: Incident, Change, and Request. This integration allows both parties to have immediate insight into activity on the SAP environments, including issues and proposed changes, from both sides.
