Wipro to run its business on SAP in Google’s cloud

Indian IT services giant Wipro is planning to upgrade its core SAP ERP system to S/4HANA and migrate the workloads to Google Cloud Platform.

It’s part of Wipro’s internal transformation program, Project Quantum, through which the company wants to bring simplicity, velocity and visibility to the way it works, said Wipro president and COO Bhanumurthy B.M.

“We are upgrading our entire ERP systems to suit our new business requirements and migrating them to Google Cloud,” he said. “It’s a big part of our roadmap.”

The move will be a demonstration to potential customers of Wipro’s SAP cloud migration capabilities, and a key step in its transformation of internal systems serving its 180,000 employees.

David McIntire, research director at analyst firm NelsonHall, said it will allow Wipro to say to potential customers, ‘’We’ve done this ourselves; we know where the big rocks are buried,” and to develop reusable assets in a relatively low-risk environment: “You’re never going to have a friendlier client than yourself.”

For Google, it’s a valuable customer win in the SAP hosting market space as it battles Amazon Web Services’ far greater cloud market share and the entrenched position of Microsoft’s Azure as SAP’s preferred cloud partner.

A partnership in the cloud

Wipro and Google have been building their SAP S/4HANA capabilities in recent years.

Rob Enslin, Google Cloud’s president of global customer operations since April 2019, previously spent 27 years at SAP, most recently as president of its Cloud Business Group.

Google has already moved on-premises S/4HANA environments into its cloud for a number of customers. A simple lift-and-shift can be done in as little as six weeks, Enslin said, although it may take up to four months.

“We do this with Wipro, we do it very securely, very fast,” he said.

Bhanumurthy said Wipro has developed tools to help their joint customers simplify the migration of workloads to Google Cloud.

“We have built toolsets that customers can leverage to take their SAP workloads to Google Cloud,” he said. “This is not just about a technical migration of the product from location A to location B. It has to focus on business first, and it has to be design led. We will help the customer reimagine their processes first.”

Proof of the pudding

“The first proof of the pudding is our own internal use of the frameworks that we have built already here,” Bhanumurthy said.

That internal path to S/4HANA, though, has been a slow one for Wipro. It’s still talking about its upgrade plans, but it was back in December 2015 that SAP first announced Wipro’s intention to migrate. At that time, SAP said its Global Service and Support organization would work with Wipro on the implementation, then expected to go live in early 2016.

Indian newspaper The Economic Times reported in March 2020 that Wipro had missed an August 2019 internal deadline to roll out Project Quantum, and now expected it to go live later in the year. The newspaper had previously reported the January resignation of a Wipro vice president who was heading up internal transformation.

For Bhanumurthy, Project Quantum is a continually moving target.

While some modules and processes have already gone live, “The service industry is changing dramatically, and consequently we need to keep upgrading our systems and we need to keep changing our systems. Obviously, there are timelines that we have for delivering individual pieces, but this is going to be a journey,” he said.

Making the business case

Other large enterprises have been dragging their heels over the move to S/4HANA too, said NelsonHall’s McIntire.

The long support window for its predecessors, SAP ERP 6.0 and Business Suite 7 – recently extended by two years – has left businesses with no sense of urgency to upgrade.

“The business case has always been one of the challenges for adoption of S/4HANA. Cloud obviously helps that business case with significant infrastructure reduction,” McIntire said.

Large enterprises have taken a multi-phase approach, first moving their core ERP data to HANA, SAP’s in-memory database, and only then considering a move to the more modern S/4HANA application suite.

“Data migration is consistently the hardest challenge of S/4HANA adoption,” said McIntire.

The road ahead

Wipro has big plans for its S/4HANA installation. Once it has its core workloads up and running on Google Cloud, it will begin ingesting all the data into BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse, and generating insights for its employees.

“For the business, that’s a very important element that we need to do; that’s the next step that’s going to happen,” said Bhanumurthy.