Indian IT services giant Wipro to update its core SAP ERP system to S / 4HANA and migrate workloads to the Google Cloud Platform. This is part of Wipro's internal transformation program, the Quantum Project, through which the IT services company wants to bring simplicity, speed and visibility to its mode of operation, according to its president and COO, Bhanumurthy Ballapuram.

This internal step will be the means to demonstrate to potential customers the capabilities of Wipro in the migration to the SAP cloud, in addition to being a key moment in the transformation of the systemss internal company, which employs 180,000 people ( which will also use the cloud provider's G Suite ). David McIntire, research director at research firm NelsonHall, says Wipro will be able to say to potential clients, “We did this ourselves; we know where the big pitfalls lie, and to develop reusable assets in a relatively low-risk environment.

A migration that takes time

For Google, this is of a precious victory in the SAP hosting market, while it fights against Amazon Web Services which has more shares there, just like Azure from Microsoft, privileged partner of the publisher of ERP on the cloud. Google has already moved S / 4HANA on-premises environments to its cloud for a number of customers. A simpletransfer can be completed in just six weeks, says Rob Enslin, president of global customer operations for Google Cloud, although a migration can take up to four months. With Wipro, Google has been developing these SAP S / 4HANA capabilities for a year .

Mr. Bhanumurthy adds that Wipro has developed tools to help its joint customers simplify their workload migrations to Google Cloud. "It 's not just a technical migration of the product from location A to location B. You have to focus on business first, and focus on design to help the customer reimagine its processes.

You can recognize a tree by its fruits

"You cannot judge the quality of something by trying it yourself.e, that's why we use the frameworks we have developed, continues Mr Bhanumurthy. This internal transition to S / 4HANA has been slow for Wipro, however. The first intentions to launch this process of the SSII date back to December 2015. At the time, SAP said that the implementation should be done in a few months, and that the platform would be operational in early 2016.

Indian newspaper The Economic Times reported in March 2020 that Wipro missed the internal August 2019 deadline for the deployment of the Quantum project, and now plans to put it into operation later in the year. 'year. The newspaper previously reported on the resignation in January of a vice president of Wipro who was leading internal transformation. For the COO of Wipro, the Quantum project is “a target in perpetual motion. Although some modules and processes are already in operation, “the service sector is changing rapidly and therefore we mustcontinue to update and modify our systems. Obviously we have deadlines for the delivery of individual projects, but it's going to be a journey.

Next step: Data integration with BigQuery

Other big companies also dragged their feet for the switch to S / 4HANA, according to Mr. McIntire of NelsonHall. The long support period of previous versions, SAP ERP 6.0 and Business Suite 7 - recently extended by two years - Has left companies with no sense of urgency to upgrade. “The issue of cost-effectiveness has always been one of the challenges for adopting S / 4HANA. The cloud is obviously an argument, in that it allows a significant reduction in infrastructure costs, says McIntire. But large companies have adopted a phased approach, in costarting by moving their core ERP data to HANA, SAP's in-memory database, and only then considering moving to the more modern S / 4HANA application suite.

Wipro a she has big plans for her S / 4HANA installation. Once its main workloads are up and running in the Google Cloud, it will start ingesting all the data into BigQuery, Google's cloud data warehouse, and generating information for its employees. For the company it is a very important element that we have to do; and so that will be the next step, concludes Mr. Bhanumurthy.