fenaco: Reducing costs, increasing uptime through SAP system modernization on Google Cloud
About fenaco
Founded in 1993, fenaco is a Switzerland-based agricultural federation that represents more than 43,000 members through 165 cooperatives.
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About itesys
itesys, a Google Cloud partner, specializes in SAP system migrations, management, and optimization, helping organizations to operate and optimize their SAP Basis components.
fenaco migrated its SAP systems to Google Cloud with the help of partner itesys to lower IT costs and further modernize operations across its agricultural cooperative community.
Google Cloud results
- Consolidates data from 10 TB to 1 TB by using HANA for in-memory database needs
- Reduces SAP application infrastructure costs by 10-15% while improving central IT's SLA
- Centralizes SAP operations by bringing more customers onto the same platform
Migrates 10 TB database to HANA in 12 hours
fenaco has 30 years of experience in helping farmers with marketing, management, and other essential business and IT processes. More recently, technology has become central to the services fenaco provides its 165 agricultural cooperatives and 43,000 members.
"The digitalization of agriculture really picked up speed in the past few years," says Martin Oberholzer, SAP Business Administrator at fenaco. "Incorporating more and better technology into agriculture is a priority. Rather than just managing a server for one of our members, we're now designing entire IT processes that will improve how cooperatives operate and deliver value to members."
fenaco long relied on legacy on-premises infrastructure for IT but recognized the merits of migrating some of its systems onto the cloud. It first targeted its SAP applications and chose to work with Google Cloud and partner itesys to modernize the business-critical tools.
"itesys has been our premium partner for a long time, and they responded quickly when we discussed migrating SAP applications to Google Cloud. They had all of the required certifications and materials to help us quickly get through migration challenges."
—Martin Oberholzer, SAP Business Administrator, fenacoReducing costs, boosting efficiencies
Cost reduction was a primary driver of fenaco's migration to Google Cloud, as the company constantly seeks ways to serve members as efficiently as possible. Compared to running SAP applications on-prem, Google Cloud offers less expensive infrastructure management and administration.
fenaco started with 10 of the 90 servers dedicated to running SAP applications that were in need of an upgrade. Google Cloud partner itesys, which fenaco had relied upon for SAP-related work for the past six years, moved quickly to map out the migration and educate fenaco staff about best practices.
"itesys has long been our premium partner, and they responded quickly when we discussed migrating SAP applications to Google Cloud," says Martin. "They had all of the required certifications and materials to help us quickly get through the migration challenges and take over operation of critical SAP systems through managed services with their SAP Basis team."
itesys provides 24/7 monitoring of the SAP system landscape, providing fenaco with reliable operation free from excessive management demands.
The effort initially focused on improving support for one of fenaco's member cooperatives, Ernst Sutter AG (ERSAG), one of fenaco's member cooperatives. As legacy hardware was nearing its end of lifecycle, itesys helped fenaco migrate its 10 TB DB2 database to S/4 HANA by defining a Google Cloud landing zone, configuring network connections and virtual machines, and establishing disaster recovery guidelines.
After HANA-certified servers were installed in Zurich and several tests had been conducted, the entire SAP landscape was successfully migrated to Google Cloud in 12 hours. Since running SAP on Google Cloud, fenaco saw a marked improvement in scaling capabilities and overall performance.
"We quickly saw just how much more performant ECC on HANA on Google Cloud is compared to on-prem DB2, especially in terms of speed," says Thomas Aeschlimann, Head of the SAP department at fenaco. "We also massively reduced data storage through the migration, bringing it down from 10 TB to 1 TB thanks to more compression from a modern in-memory database."
"It was soon obvious to us just how much better performing HANA on Google Cloud is compared to on-prem DB2, especially in terms of speed. We also massively reduced our data storage requirements, decreasing it from 10 TB to 1 TB thanks to more compression in a modern in-memory database."
—Thomas Aeschlimann, Head of the SAP Department, fenacoModernizing SAP applications across the cooperative federation
Moving forward, fenaco will use this project as a flagship for further SAP migrations as different cooperatives and systems become necessary to move to the cloud.
"Having all of our members and customers on the same platform is a very exciting prospect for us," says Thomas. "Compared to disparate on-prem systems, running everything on Google Cloud makes it easier for us to manage our customers' SAP workloads and offer them a more scalable, higher-performing environment."
Looking back, fenaco believes that its partnership with itesys for the migration was vital to the overall success.
"Google Cloud provides the flexibility we need to not just lift-and-shift but also improve our SAP landscape overall, while itesys provides the expertise we need to optimize all the benefits of the migration and reliable operation," says Martin. "We have more migrations planned and are confident that fenaco will continue to benefit from our relationships with itesys and Google Cloud."
"Google Cloud provides the flexibility we need to not just lift-and-shift but also improve our SAP landscape overall, while itesys provides the expertise we need to optimize all the benefits of the migration and reliable operation."
—Martin Oberholzer, SAP Business Administrator, fenacoTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About fenaco
Founded in 1993, fenaco is a Switzerland-based agricultural federation that represents more than 43,000 members through 165 cooperatives.
About itesys
itesys, a Google Cloud partner, specializes in SAP system migrations, management, and optimization, helping organizations to operate and optimize their SAP Basis components.