Rossi Residencial migrates SAP to the cloud with zero impact on operations
Snehanshu Shah
Managing Director, SAP
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Free trialRossi Residencial is one of Brazil’s largest construction companies and real estate developers, with more than 115,000 clients in residential and commercial properties. The company had successfully relied on a managed deployment of SAP for its financial operations since 1999, first on premises and later with a private cloud provider. But in 2017, Rossi began a strategic financial restructuring focused on improving its operating efficiency. To support its vision for the business, Rossi needed the flexibility to add or subtract SAP resources based not just on growth, but also on demand, which can vary considerably from year to year. The company decided that the best way to accomplish this would be to migrate its SAP environment to the public cloud.
The original cloud provider Rossi chose had become extremely costly as the U.S. dollar rose against the Brazilian Real. What’s more, the Rossi team was less than satisfied with the provider’s service. So the search began for a cloud provider that could offer high availability and scalability, as well as an implementation partner familiar with the company’s previous cloud provider.
After researching its options, the company chose Google Cloud as its provider and Sky.One as its implementation partner. “Out of the cloud options we researched, Google Cloud offered us the best financial conditions and a solution that truly catered to us,” says Eduardo Araújo, Rossi Residencial’s IT manager. “And out of the many partners we contacted, Sky.One offered the best work planning and service.”
A delightfully uneventful move to Google Cloud
The contract with the original cloud provider was nearing its end, which compressed the timeframe for the migration. Given the time constraints, Sky.One and Rossi determined that instead of migrating every app in Google Cloud from scratch, the best approach would be to mirror its architecture completely by migrating all of its virtual machines from the company’s four SAP environment servers directly to Google Cloud. To complete the operation, Sky.One used Google Migrate for Compute Engine, a tool designed to facilitate and streamline this type of migration while reducing risk.
Working closely with the Rossi team, Sky.One mapped the source structure in detail to prepare the destination with the integrations and accesses it would need to support the SAP environment, which included ECC with four VM instances for DEV, QAS, PRD, and Legacy. The process took just a month to complete with zero impact on operations — something Rossi had never achieved over three previous cloud migrations. Given that history, the ease of integration between Google Cloud and SAP was a pleasant surprise. “We were worried about potential incompatibilities, and we didn’t know if we would be able to work like before,” Araújo says. “Sky.One spared no effort to make the cloud migration safe and without impacting our operation. Today, we can work even better than before.” Adds Ricardo Nunes, Sky.One’s Solution Expert, “Google Cloud’s solutions support all SAP migration steps, but after migrating, we noticed that daily operations had become even more tightly integrated.”
The company’s SAP environment now runs in Compute Engine, a service from Google Cloud for creating and running VMs. Rossi’s SAP data is stored in Google Cloud Storage. As a result, the company has a great deal more flexibility to maintain availability and performance even when resizing VMs. “If I need to open a new branch or break ground on a project, the entire system core is already in the cloud, and I don’t have to worry about local infrastructure,” Araújo explains. “Being in Google Cloud gives us the flexibility to increase or decrease our resources according to our needs. We also don't worry about the local data center and its updating, generating a very important medium- to long-term saving for us.”
Rossi also gained another, even more dramatic savings: Because Google Cloud bills in local currency at a fixed exchange rate with dollars, the company has experienced a 50% cost reduction versus its previous provider.
New plans for even more operational improvements
With the migration to Google Cloud complete, Rossi’s IT team has more time to focus on business needs instead of operational issues. Araújo says the company is now able to consider taking advantage of additional Google Cloud tools — including data analytics and AI — to make the most of its extensive data and improve operations and customer service even further. By moving its SAP environment to Google Cloud, Rossi has not only been able to spend less for better service. It has also gained a flexible, scalable platform upon which to build the efficiencies and customer experiences of its future.
Learn more about Rossi Residencial’s SAP migration to Google Cloud and hear from other SAP customers about their experiences.