GFT Technologies: Deploying SAP on Google Cloud to reduce costs and bolster innovation
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As a pioneer for digital transformation, GFT develops sustainable solutions across new technologies. GFT gives its clients easy and safe access to scalable IT applications and innovative business models.
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As a world-leading provider of business software, SAP helps companies to grow sustainably, increase profits, and adapt to new challenges.
GFT moves its SAP S/4HANA system to Google Cloud with SAP RISE, ensuring a seamless transition of SAP workloads to the cloud and laying the groundwork for innovation with Google Cloud solutions.
Google Cloud results
- Accelerates cloud transition with RISE with SAP, leveraging Google Cloud infrastructure with high performance and built-in availability
- Stimulates future innovation with SAP on Google Cloud, enabling simple integrations of Google Cloud services such as BigQuery
Migrating SAP workloads while maintaining 99.9% SLA
The cloud is ubiquitous. It drives many of today’s technological innovations and will underpin even more of tomorrow’s: Gartner expects spending on public cloud services to reach $482 billion in 2022, a 21.7% increase from 2021. But the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and businesses need to carve out their own paths towards digitization.
GFT Technologies helps many of the world’s leading companies in the financial, insurance, and manufacturing sectors drive their digital transformation. In past years, GFT delivered a cutting-edge mobile banking solution with Mox Bank, enabled insurance provider Alper Seguros to build a future-ready brokerage with cloud technology, and helped sheet-metal fabricator GS Metaal to raise productivity by 30% with real-time data access. But those are just some of GTF’s success stories, which exemplify the company’s extensive range of expertise across industries and technologies.
“Data centers will be obsolete in the near future, and cloud is the way forward. With RISE with SAP, we saw the opportunity to accelerate our cloud transformation and free up time we used to spend on manual backups and other tasks for more value-adding work, using the Google Cloud infrastructure.”
—Inigo Perez Camps, SAP Team Lead, GFT TechnologiesAccelerating GFT’s cloud transformation
As an enabler of cloud transformation, GFT needs a secure cloud infrastructure to match its ambitions as a digital pioneer. To that end, GFT carefully selects technology partners that help the company stay ahead of the competition. In order to fully realize its own cloud vision, GFT decided to close its data centers by 2022 and migrate its SAP systems, the backbone for many critical business processes, to the cloud. GFT was already one of the first companies of its size to implement SAP S/4HANA, and moving to the cloud was the next step in staying ahead on technology trends
“Data centers will be obsolete in the near future, and cloud is the way forward,” says Inigo Perez Camps, SAP Team Lead at GFT Technologies. “With RISE with SAP we saw the opportunity to accelerate our cloud transformation and free up time we used to spend on manual backups and other tasks for more value-adding work, using the Google Cloud infrastructure.”
Leveraging strong ties between Google Cloud and SAP
Working with Google Cloud isn’t exactly new territory for GFT: In 2019, the company even won the Google Cloud EMEA Breakthrough Partner of the Year award, recognizing its dedication to customer success on Google Cloud. But with its SAP migration, GFT saw the opportunity to extend the collaboration with Google Cloud from the customer side to its internal systems. With a multicloud setup, GFT wanted to prevent vendor lock-in, and SAP’s strong and future-facing partnership with Google Cloud made it the right fit to provide the underlying infrastructure to operate SAP in the cloud.
“Our strategy is to have all our on-prem applications in the cloud by end of 2022,” says Leander van Delden, Head of Applications at GFT Technologies. “Migrating SAP into the cloud won’t just help us save money, it’s a real opportunity for us to bring a new partner on board. SAP’s strong ties with Google Cloud gave us the confidence that Google Cloud was the right cloud provider for this project.“
“The use of data, especially big data, is becoming increasingly important. Google Cloud provides many solutions in this space, such as BigQuery, and will help to strengthen our innovation capabilities in the future.”
—Leander van Delden, Head of Applications, GFT TechnologiesEnsuring a seamless transition with Google Cloud
Reliability and uptime are crucial for GFT’s cloud deployments. With Google Cloud, GFT can transition into the cloud seamlessly, reducing planned and unforeseen outages during the process. Google Cloud is also the only vendor that can live-migrate SAP S/4HANA workloads while maintaining a 99.9% service level agreement.
“Google Cloud is an established player in this space, and with its scalability and availability, we’re envisioning a smooth transition to our new cloud-based SAP environment that’s resilient upon arrival,” says Perez Camps.
“There’s a strong sense of partnership and constant communication between Google Cloud and SAP, which really helped push the project forward. We’re confident in the business value of this transformation with RISE with SAP, and look forward to exploring the opportunities that our new Google Cloud infrastructure will open up.”
—Leander van Delden, Head of Applications, GFT TechnologiesLaying the groundwork for future innovation
Once GFT’s SAP workloads are on Google Cloud, the company will be able to leverage more Google Cloud services, including solutions in artificial intelligence or machine learning. With the ability to easily integrate additional Google technologies, GFT can streamline management and bolster innovation. For the GFT team, the data solutions of Google Cloud are particularly interesting.
“The use of data, especially big data, is becoming increasingly important,” says van Delden. “Google Cloud provides many solutions in this space, such as BigQuery, and will help to strengthen our innovation capabilities in the future.”
But first, van Delden and his team are fully focused on the SAP migration, confident that combining SAP’s services with resilient Google Cloud infrastructure will accelerate GFT’s cloud transformation. A constant throughout the project has been the close relationship between SAP and Google Cloud and their mutual dedication to GFT and its challenges.
“There’s a strong sense of partnership and constant communication between Google Cloud and SAP, which really helped push the project forward,” says van Delden. “We’re confident in the business value of this transformation with SAP RISE, and look forward to exploring the opportunities that our new Google Cloud infrastructure will open up.”
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About GFT
As a pioneer for digital transformation, GFT develops sustainable solutions across new technologies. GFT gives its clients easy and safe access to scalable IT applications and innovative business models.
About SAP
As a world-leading provider of business software, SAP helps companies to grow sustainably, increase profits, and adapt to new challenges.