US-based IT services firm Cognizant on Monday said the company has nearly completed migrating Orica’s IT infrastructure to the cloud. Orica is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems.

This is the first instance of SAP S/4HANA being deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud by Cognizant and one of the largest SAP cloud deployments in the world. Australia-based Orica, has about 11,000 users across 57 countries across the world using the SAP platform.

“We have been investing heavily into our centre of excellence for various SAP practices such as Success Factor, HANA, Ariba etc. This project has been extremely critical to demonstrate the capabilities that we’ve built on SAP through these centres of excellence.

“SAP so far been commonly used on premise but now its slowly moving on various clouds. This was our first project conceived where SAP S/4HANA was deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud. We had a great partnership with MS and SUSE. We have gone live with two thirds of the project,” Debashis Chatterjee, President, Global Delivery, Cognizant, said.

Cognizant, which has been going slow on traditional IT services projects to focus on higher margin digital deals, has built a team of 20,000 to exclusively work on cloud migrations—a big area for digital transformation for enterprises across the world.

The Orica implementation has ensured that the entire organisation across 57 countries has access to the same platform on cloud, with the ability to access their tools through an app from anywhere and on any device.

Orica selected Cognizant as technology advisor and managed cloud-platform provider to develop a highly available, scalable and resilient IT platform on a pay-per-usage model, to enable “anywhere, anytime, any device” mobile access to core enterprise systems.

As a part of this initiative, Cognizant has designed and implemented a managed platform-as-a-service based on the SAP S/4HANA intelligent ERP solution on Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, as part of the ongoing implementation, eight of Orica’s core enterprise business processes are being transitioned to the new S/4HANA platform in 57 countries around the world.

“New technologies hold great potential for us to align with the needs of a fast-changing market by driving innovation and enabling new ways to work across every part of Orica,” said Gabriela Azzali, 4S Programme Director, Orica. “Cognizant leveraged its deep cloud technology and platforms capabilities to architect, design and build SAP systems on HANA deployed on Microsoft Azure. They built business critical SAP systems to kick-start the programme right on schedule and implemented automation processes in operations to keep infrastructure costs under control,” Azzali said.

“Making business critical systems such as SAP S/4HANA highly available requires a well-defined architecture and Cognizant, Microsoft and SUSE worked together to build a collaborative solution based on multi-node iSCSI server configuration. Significantly, this configuration is the first ever such deployment on Microsoft Azure,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO.

“The ability to quickly and cost-effectively deploy, manage and operate modern, dynamic and scalable architectures on industry-leading cloud platforms is crucial for enterprises to achieve the future of work today,” said Rajesh Balaji Ramachandran, Senior Vice President, Global Delivery Leader for Enterprise Application Services, Cognizant. “We are pleased to be helping Orica embrace the cloud and develop powerful provisioning, monitoring and automation capabilities to increase operational resilience and manage market volatility. Cognizant’s future-ready CRI framework providing IT on demand will help Orica empower employees, improve speed-to-market and make operations safe, secure and reliable to deliver sustainable value to its stakeholders.”

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