Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI): The Ultimate Lifesaver

Managing complex business processes with decentralized data where each business process stores its own operational data in separate databases is the definition of chaos. Duplication of data across multiple departments increasing the IT storage costs and risk of data errors tags along. The SAP software hit the market and created ripples that still travels. It solved the infamous decentralization disaster by centralizing data management to help businesses make data-driven business decisions that catalyse growth. However, in today’s digitally dependent world, businesses need solutions that are fast enough to meet the demands of real-time operations, flexible enough to adapt quickly to changing business and market requirements and secure enough to protect valuable data.

Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI), a long-standing SAP customer and consultant, ran its SAP systems from an on-premises data centre and they wanted to run the SAP S/4HANA from a cloud-computing infrastructure. Kamal Shah, Chief Information Officer, LTI, explains, “There were several benefits of moving from an on-premises environment to the cloud. We could reduce our capital IT costs because we no longer had to buy hardware. We could also make the IT behind our SAP system more agile while cutting back on IT management through greater automation.”

By leveraging its own Cloud Centre of Excellence along with AWS Professional Services, LTI designed and sized the AWS infrastructure for their SAP solution. They then created a “sandbox” to test the SAP S/4HANA applications on the AWS Cloud before moving them to preproduction followed by a production platform. “We built our SAP S/4HANA infrastructure on AWS in a matter of weeks and transferred data from our on-premises data centre to the AWS environments in just days,” says Shah. “It was a totally seamless process.” Today, the SAP S/4HANA infrastructure on the AWS Cloud supports all of LTI’s SAP financial and procurement applications. The infrastructure runs on SAP-accredited Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with Elastic Load Balancing distributing data traffic. To help optimize the infrastructure, LTI also uses AWS Lambda, which automatically shuts down non-production systems during quiet periods to reduce costs.

LTI executives now have real-time operational data which allows them to make informed business decisions and a birds-eye view on the functionalities. “We can now develop our strategies based on an up-to-date view of the business, which enables our executives to be more effective,” says Shah. The SAP infrastructure on AWS is remarkably cost-effective than the on-premise data centre in addition to the improved decision making. “Our IT spend is now closely aligned to IT usage,” explains Shah. “We can scale IT resources up and down in parallel with demand. We no longer have IT going unused during quieter business periods.”

The agility also enables LTI to promote innovation. “At LTI, we have a customer-centric approach, which means we are continually looking for new ways to improve our response times,” says Shah. “We have been able to improve time-to-market in many areas with our core LTI applications running on AWS. For example, we have reduced the procure-to-deploy time for new hardware from weeks to minutes.” Additionally, LTI has cut down on the number of IT resources it needs for its SAP systems. “The auto-scaling and failover capabilities available with AWS services save the IT team a lot of time because they are no longer responsible for so many routine administration tasks,” notes Shah. “The self-service provisioning in AWS also lowers the management burden and frees up our staff to work on strategic projects.” Finally, LTI can now demonstrate expertise in running SAP S/4HANA on AWS. Shah says, “We can showcase our skill sets around SAP S/4HANA on AWS and reference the infrastructure in discussions with customers on our SAP S/4HANA managed services. It’s a powerful sales tool.”