Founded in Switzerland in 2006 with a fully owned subsidiary in India and branches in both the UK and Japan, ITPC Group specializes in the design, implementation, migration, modernization, and operation of SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small, medium, and large organizations. In the 14 years since its founding, the company has successfully completed more than 400 small- and large-scale SAP projects for customers across a wide variety of industries and locations, from South America and Europe to the Middle East and Asia.

The launch of its SAP on Azure offering in 2015 not only marked the inauguration of ITPC Group as a Microsoft Partner, but as a pioneer in SAP on Azure throughout Europe. Combining its expertise in SAP technologies with the world’s leading cloud solution, ITPC Group has completed over 36 SAP on Azure projects in different markets and industries over the last five years, delivering greater flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings than an on-premises infrastructure. With a team of more than 50 highly experienced consultants, multiple HANA-certified engineers, status as a SAP partner, and as a Microsoft Gold Partner with Gold Cloud Platform Competency, ITPC Group is an ideal partner for migrating SAP landscapes to Azure cloud and propelling modern businesses into the future.

The only constant is change

SAP has demonstrated its commitment to customers by consistently delivering new features and enhancement packages to previous SAP solutions, and by extending mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 core applications. However, to harness the full innovative potential of SAP and to benefit from new technologies that enable an intelligent ERP, SAP will phase out support for previous solutions by 2027, making migration to S/4HANA inevitable.

Although many SAP customers view this as an opportunity for a system conversion and EHP upgrade in anticipation of the 2027 change, few are aware of the potential pitfalls should their journey start off on the wrong foot. Any missteps in the beginning of the journey could result in an inflexible architecture with limited scalability or an improperly sized SAP HANA landscape with potentially degraded performance, as well as incur unnecessary conversions and migrations further downstream—all of which can rapidly and significantly escalate costs.

Since no SAP customer can accurately predict how these impending changes over the next five years might affect their business and the existing structure of their SAP system, it’s to their distinct advantage to adopt a flexible architecture today that can accommodate new technologies and enable future innovation. Microsoft Azure, as the foundation for SAP on Azure from ITPC Group, provides just such flexibility.

Fast, flexible, future-proof

SAP customers who are weighing migrating to the cloud must consider three things: will the new cloud-based infrastructure deliver the flexibility they need to accommodate current and future workloads? Can additional systems be deployed quickly to meet sudden and fluctuating needs? And, of course, can it deliver these things economically?

For SAP customers who have entrusted their cloud migration to ITPC Group, the answer to all three is a resounding yes.

ITPC Group’s SAP on Azure solution allows customers to quickly and flexibly deploy additional systems on demand, increasing their ability to adopt new technologies and ensuring ample room for innovation. With SAP on Azure, customers need only decide on the size, performance, and capacity of the additional virtual machines to be deployed, and they can be up and running in a matter of minutes. By contrast, a typical hardware-based infrastructure can take weeks or even months to accomplish the same.

SAP on Azure also creates a highly dynamic SAP environment that enables customers to continuously transform and adapt their SAP systems without the same restrictions as a physical infrastructure. Free from dependencies on hardware lifecycles, Azure not only delivers the robust adaptability that a customer’s current ERP system requires, but also opens the door to future innovations, such as the upcoming S/4HANA transformation.

In addition to greater flexibility, ITPC Group customers running SAP on Azure also benefit from significantly lower infrastructure-related costs as compared to their on-premises equivalent. It’s easy to understand how; no physical hardware means no maintenance and replacement costs, while consumption-based pricing means customers only pay for what they use, which translates into lower operating expenses. A traditional on-premises infrastructure simply lacks this level of flexibility and cost efficiency.

For SAP customers who have already decided on a definitive path toward S/4HANA or want to accelerate their journey, ITPC Group and its partner Adfinis SyGroup, which specializes in open-source technologies, offer a custom solution called SOLHANA. Shorthand for “Solutions for HANA,” SOLHANA continues a customer’s SAP transformation with ongoing services for planning, implementing, and operating SAP S/4HANA within the customer’s environment. Since every migration path is unique, SOLHANA is individually tailored to each customer’s needs, enabling them to make the move to S/4HANA per a timetable of their own specific resourcing and scheduling requirements.

Ready for tomorrow—realizing benefits today

ProNovia AG is an ITPC Group customer that is constantly exploring ways to increase its adaptability to new SAP applications and technology platforms, as well as improve the overall flexibility of its infrastructure. Following several consultations with ITPC Group—including several performance, stability, and reliability tests conducted by ITPC Group—the company made the strategic decision to migrate its SAP infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. By moving to Azure, ProNovia was able to deploy additional systems in a fast and flexible manner, which increased its ability to adopt new technologies. Thanks to SAP on Azure from ITPC Group, the company not only created room for future innovation, but was also ready to begin its journey to S/4HANA, a transformation that was completed in the following months. In addition, as a result of migrating to Azure, ProNovia lowered its SAP hosting costs by 35 percent.