When Ayala Land announced its goal to achieve 40 billion pesos (approximately USD777 million) in net income by 2020, Chief Information Officer(CIO), Annie Alipao, and team analysed what this would mean for their data center requirements.

Determining a need for roughly 3 TB of storage for SAP if the company maintained its own data centers, up from the current 1 TB, they also planned to upgrade to SAP HANA, an in-memory database platform offering more accuracy, better performance and more sophisticated analytics capabilities than Ayala Land’s existing SAP architecture. The switch would necessitate replacing current hardware with SAP HANA–compliant machines, which would prove costly.

Alipao began experimenting with cloud technologies in 2015, first migrating to Microsoft Office 365 and then Ayala Land’s Sales Reservation System to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Pleased with the low latency and fast performance, Alipao started advocating to move everything to the AWS Cloud by 2020, eliminating on-premise data centers. The flexibility of AWS’ offerings was also a deciding factor, with options designed for any size of business. “AWS allows you to start small and grow when you need it,” Alipao says.

As of August 2017, Ayala Land had fully migrated its SAP workloads onto AWS.

The rapid growth of Ayala Land’s businesses required more transaction processing and the capacity to support an increase in the number of users; between 2001 and 2015, the company’s user base for enterprise application systems grew from 200 to 3,500, 1,700 of which were SAP users. By this time, application and hardware constraints were causing performance issues.

In 2016 Ayala Land embarked on its SAP migration from ECC to S4 Hana, taking advantage of the Hana Database to address performance issues. At the same time as Ayala Land’s hardware refresh was due, cloud hosting became a viable solution to address hardware constraints and growth requirements.

With servers needing refreshment every five years, and a procurement, delivery and provisioning cycle that averaged up to five months, the business had to plan well in advance to avoid delays and lost time.

“If you run out of storage, that’s scary,” says Alipao. “I always had to track things to ensure we had the right capacity to address growth.”

IT infrastructure manager at Ayala Land, Rod Villahermosa, was tasked with evaluating cloud providers. Over a couple of years, his team tested a handful of competitors but found ‘bare metal’ rental arrangements didn’t meet their needs for a more consolidated, managed approach.

“We had several criteria, including ease of use, availability of a direct connection and security, and AWS was a clear winner,” said Villahermosa

The final decision came when local telcos offered an affordable solution using AWS Direct to give the Philippines access to AWS Singapore instances.

Ensuring a consolidated approach, the AWS management console was intuitive and user friendly, requiring less time to provision resources. The team chose to run its SAP HANA database on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) memory-optimised R4 instances, a special AWS instance type designed to accommodate enterprise applications such as SAP. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) now provides persistent block-storage volumes for all Amazon EC2 instances, with those running SAP and others dedicated to separate business applications. In addition, Ayala Land monitors all instances with Amazon CloudWatch, automatically invoking AWS Lambda scripts, and it uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to strengthen security.

Demonstrating her team’s commitment to Ayala Land’s 2020 revenue goal, Alipao was able to present a 24 percent decrease in total cost of ownership to its It Steering Committee. This amount would go a significant way to achieving the company’s 40 billion peso revenue goal.

Contributing to these savings are lower IT costs, less data center maintenance, better performance and more efficient provisioning of resources. AWS architecture has also helped alleviate stress associated with unpredictable spikes in database usage.

Without the need for daily database replication, which is now done automatically using CloudWatch and Lambda, Rod Villahermosa is able to free up valuable resources. He has retired 90 TB of storage in this year alone.

Villahermosa and his team handled most of the cloud migration on their own. “There’s so much documentation and resources available on the AWS site that we could basically learn by ourselves; it was pretty easy,” he says.

As part of its Business Support Plan, Ayala Land signed up to AWS Support. Villahermosa was impressed with the response time, as an AWS representative contacted him in minutes to answer any queries.

Processing speed has also improved since migrating to SAP HANA on the AWS Cloud. Each month, the company runs an aging report on 20 mall properties, with more than 150,000 line items. With its previous system running SAP on-premises, the report took 5 days to produce, including time required for downloading and manually consolidating data.

“We had resources we didn’t need because of the fear of running out of storage,” says Alipao. “That cost of maintaining unused servers is not even factored in the 24 percent savings in our TCO analysis.”

With HANA on AWS, the report is generated in just 2 minutes, thanks to the low latency offered through AWS Direct Connect and the processing power of R4 memory-optimized instances. Villahermosa has tracked average latency at 30–40 milliseconds.

Furthermore, the speed of procurement has also improved. In the past, the procurement process of hardware alone could take up to two months, followed by a 45-day delivery lead time and additional time for deployment. Using AWS, new resources can be added in 24 hours if needed. Says Villahermosa, “If the instances are simple, I can set them up with the AWS console in as little as 4 hours.”

Alipao’s team is happy with their new setup and promotes SAP on AWS to other lines of business within the Ayala conglomerate. “SAP on AWS is really the way to go,” she concludes. “It helps me sleep at night.”

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