Woolworths harnesses the Cloud

Australian supermarket giant Woolworths believes its cloud transformation is making work simpler for its teams. Cloud is helping the organisation to streamline the supply chains and improve customer experiences across its network of stores and online channels, said John Hunt CIO at Woolworths. “We’re harnessing the cloud to provide evergreen infrastructures that foster innovation and improve speed to market,” he said.

According to Hunt, Microsoft will supply the backbone cloud technologies for Woolworths’ SAP solutions as the retailer migrates its current SAP footprint to Azure, paving the way for the upgrade path to SAP S/4HANA.

“Azure is a trusted, resilient and high performing cloud platform, supporting our ongoing digital transformation and we are confident it will provide us with the performance and flexibility required to meet our ever evolving SAP requirements in providing an exceptional customer experience,” he said.

Woolworths is one of the first company in the Asia Pacific Japan region, and one of the first in the world to leverage the Embrace initiative – again reinforcing its pioneering approach to digital transformation, said Hunt.

SAP and Microsoft launched the initiative in October 2019. Under the agreement Microsoft will resell components of SAP Cloud Platform alongside Azure. This unique offering is aimed at more easily migrating SAP ERP application and SAP S/4HANA customers from on premise to public cloud.

“This partnership is all about reducing complexity and minimising costs for customers as they move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud,” said Jennifer Morgan, co-chief executive officer of SAP SE. “Bringing together the power of SAP and Microsoft provides customers with the assurance of working with two industry leaders so they can confidently and efficiently transition into intelligent enterprises.”

SAP will lead with Microsoft Azure to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud through industry-specific best practices, reference architectures and cloud-delivered services. This includes future deployment and migration of existing direct SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers leveraging hyperscaler infrastructure. However, SAP continues with its long-standing policy of supporting choice for those customers who request alternatives based on business requirements.

Specifically, project “Embrace” on Microsoft Azure will provide customers with:

• A simplified move from on-premise editions of SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA for customers with integrated product and industry solutions. Industry market bundles will create a road map to the cloud for customers in focused industries, with a singular reference architecture and path to streamline implementation.
• Collaborative support model for simplified resolution. In response to customer feedback, a combined support model for Azure and SAP Cloud Platform will help ease migration and improve communication.