Seamless SAP Migration to Google Cloud: Accelerating Solenis's Digital Transformation Journey

Editor’s note: In this post, we’ll hear from specialty chemical manufacturer Solenis about how its migration journey to SAP on Google Cloud has supercharged its innovation and unlocked new value. Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, the company has 69 manufacturing facilities strategically located around the globe and employs a team of over 16,000 professionals in 130 countries across six continents

Migrating SAP to the cloud isn't just a trend; it's a strategic move transforming how businesses operate. Imagine cutting costs, boosting performance, and easily scaling your resources — that's the power of SAP in the cloud.

Consider the experience of Solenis, a leading global producer of specialty chemicals for water-intensive industries, which migrated its business to a modern digital platform in the public cloud to help improve its agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Owned by Platinum Equity, Solenis provides a broad array of sustainable solutions, including water treatment chemistries, process aids, functional additives, cleaners and disinfectants, as well as state-of-the-art monitoring and control systems. Customers use these technologies to improve operational efficiencies, enhance product quality, protect plant assets, minimize environmental impact, and create cleaner and safer environments.

In recent years, Solenis has grown by acquisition, leading to a complex and unwieldy IT environment. To address these challenges, Solenis decided to migrate its on-premises SAP workloads, which run its mission-critical business processes, to SAP on Google Cloud. Given its rapidly increasing memory requirements, Solenis opted to forego a hardware refresh and instead chose to leverage flexible cloud-based infrastructure with High Availability (HA) capabilities to support near-zero downtime. 

Google Cloud Consulting worked with Solenis to prepare its migration teams, fill the skills gap, and successfully run SAP in Google Cloud. Together, Google Cloud Consulting and Solenis migrated the company’s SAP workloads, including SAP ERP, Global Trade Services, Adobe Document Service, GRC (governance, risk, and compliance), and many other bolt-on applications — all in less than five months.

Migrating SAP to Google Cloud

With guidance from Google Cloud Consulting, Solenis was able to minimize downtime during the migration by carefully planning and testing the process, including the performance. This helped to identify and resolve any potential issues before they could cause any disruptions to Solenis’ business operations. 

During the migration, for instance, the Solenis team faced a number of performance and technical issues while working to migrate workloads from its SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP Global Trade Services applications to Google Cloud. During Q&A testing, Solenis discovered an issue with one of its on-premises components that would have caused significant project delays if not addressed promptly. Working with Google Cloud Consulting, the team was able to quickly pinpoint the root cause and implement a solution before it could impact the migration process.

Choosing the right approach to moving data from on-premises to Google Cloud was another critical step to ensure the project was completed with minimal downtime and optimal success. Working with Google Cloud Consulting, Solenis decided to implement a three-step approach that yielded a significant reduction in downtime.

Data was migrated from an on-premises server to Google Cloud using a Network File Share and rsync (a remote and local file synchronization tool). This approach reduced downtime by five to six hours.

The company also took advantage of Google Cloud's managed backup and disaster recovery services to ensure that its data was always protected throughout the migration.

“We are grateful to the Google Cloud team for their exceptional support and expertise during the migration of our SAP environment from on-premises to the cloud,” said Adrian Giboi, vice president of infrastructure and operations at Solenis. “This significant accomplishment was achieved with minimal interruption to our operations, which is a testament to the dedication and proficiency of the Google Cloud team.” 

Accelerating innovation and unlocking new business value

The migration to Google Cloud has delivered a number of benefits to Solenis. For example, Solenis was able to transition from Oracle databases to SAP HANA, providing a solid foundation for future performance improvements. With real-time access to data, SAP HANA can help businesses make faster and more informed decisions, deliver a more personalized and responsive customer experience, and provide a platform for innovation. 

In addition, the migration helped Solenis reduce the complexity and management overhead of its previous IT environment. Google Cloud also made it easier for Solenis to perform ongoing maintenance without business interruptions. With on-premises environments, planned maintenance activities often require downtime, which can disrupt or delay service, impact productivity, or even result in potential loss in business. 

With Google Cloud, such instances can be significantly reduced. Features like live migration allow for seamless transfers of virtual machines between hosts without causing downtime for customers. Additionally, Google Cloud's 99.99% compute SLA , with instances in multiple zones, guarantees high availability, further minimizing the risk of unplanned outages. By leveraging Google Cloud's capabilities, Solenis can ensure uninterrupted service for their customers, avoiding the negative impacts of downtime. This leads to improved customer satisfaction, increased productivity, and a stronger business reputation.

Furthermore, Google Cloud's secure-by-design infrastructure and robust security features have helped Solenis to improve its security posture. The company has been able to achieve compliance with a number of industry regulations, such as ISO 27001.

Since moving to Google Cloud, Solenis has experienced a 10x increase in response and transition times, leading to improved efficiency and productivity. Overall, performance improved by 35% utilizing Google Cloud resources for compute, memory, and storage. The company has also been able to optimize costs and improve performance by taking advantage of Google Cloud's committed use discounts (CUDs) and its high-performance compute and storage capabilities.

“Our migration to SAP on Google Cloud is a crucial milestone in our company's digital transformation journey, significantly reducing our technical debt and lowering operational costs,” Giboi said. “It not only enhances our agility and scalability but also positions us to better leverage innovative cloud technologies for future growth. Google Cloud is a reliable partner in our journey towards a more efficient, flexible, and sustainable technological future.”

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