Supporting business transformation for German retailers with SAP on Google Cloud

The retail industry is rapidly evolving, with customers demanding exceptional digital experiences, and retailers adjusting their businesses to be more efficient. With many retailers relying on SAP for critical business functions like digital transactions, finance, supply chains and more, this shift has led them to look for ways to modernize these systems, deliver them on highly scalable infrastructure, and extract more value out of the data from within them.  

I’m proud that we are helping German retailers successfully migrate business-critical SAP systems onto Google Cloud, minimizing risk and downtime and ultimately helping them build a foundation for future growth. Our work with retailers like Otto Group, one of the world’s largest ecommerce businesses, MediaMarktSaturn, the large consumer electronics retailer, and METRO, the wholesale retailer with operations across Europe, demonstrates our deep partnership with SAP to support customers' digital transformations.

Helping Otto Group IT run SAP on secure, sustainable infrastructure

Otto Group, a leading online-retailer and services group in Germany and one of the world’s largest ecommerce companies, migrated their SAP workloads to Google Cloud in order to modernize their SAP landscape and build a more agile environment that would enable them to quickly scale up or down according to business needs. 

The Otto Group, which consistently balances the sustainable use of resources and climate-neutral action with economic growth, is also able to leverage Google Cloud's clean infrastructure to deliver the bulk of its internal SAP environment, ensuring the company's business systems are running on secure, sustainable infrastructure. Since 2017, Google has matched 100% of its global electricity use with purchases of renewable energy every year, and is now building on that progress with a new goal of running entirely on carbon-free energy at all times by 2030. 

With Google Cloud, Otto Group has told us they have access to better means of automation and improved network capability compared to what they had with their previous provider. Through this cloud migration, Otto Group IT is providing modern and flexibly scalable SAP systems to their internal customers.

Powering MediaMarktSaturn’s online ecommerce experience 

For MediaMarktSaturn, SAP is critical to the smooth day-to-day running of its business, so the company was keen to ensure maximum availability and stability with a cloud environment. After a thorough examination of its business needs and hands-on support from Google Cloud's teams, MediaMarktSaturn elected to migrate its SAP HANA database onto Google Cloud, enabling a performance increase of four times compared to its previous on-premises installations.

The SAP suite is critical for the ecommerce platform to run smoothly on a day-to-day basis. By migrating to Google Cloud, the retailer is providing even more support and maximum availability for its customers. With Google Cloud’s industry-specific expertise, MediaMarktSaturn’s customers have access to a reliable and stable ecommerce platform, so they can browse for products online from wherever they are. 

Transforming METRO’s business by running SAP workloads in the cloud 

With more than 97,000 employees in 34 countries, Germany’s METRO is one of the world’s largest B2B wholesalers. Previously, METRO relied on unique finance systems that were different in each country,  and updates or system testing required substantial coordination across numerous teams, which was both time-consuming and costly. 

To address these pain points, METRO is moving away from on premise deployments and is now migrating its SAP S/4HANA finance systems to Google Cloud to support everything from classical role-based accounting to the use of cognitive tools. Now, internal METRO teams can work seamlessly across operations, enhancing the services they provide to customers by addressing demands in real time. 

To read more about how SAP on Google Cloud drives agility, efficiency, and innovation for our customers, visit our solutions page here.