Instone Real Estate – Bechtle migrates SAP system landscape to Microsoft Azure

Instone Real Estate – Bechtle migrates SAP system landscape to Microsoft Azure.

The Instone Real Estate Group AG is headquartered in Essen and develops out beautiful architectural projects across Germany, spanning design, construction and renovation. In their 30 years of existence, the company has created over one million square metres of living space in the form of apartment blocks, houses, modern city districts and landmarked objects. Bechtle migrated their SAP system landscapes required for business and sector-specific tasks from the on-premise data centre to the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, saving Instone Real Estate Group AG a considerable amount and making them more agile for the future.

Project details.

Services

Software
Cloud

Industry

Trade / Service

Manufacturer

SAP, Microsoft

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

The Instone Real Estate Group AG has 30 years’ experience of realising large construction projects across Germany. The SDAX-listed company builds approx. 1,000 living quarters a year, which it sells to independent buyers or private and institutional investors. This makes the Instone Real Estate Group a reliable partner for public authorities, private landlords and institutional housing investors alike. The company takes its social responsibility very seriously, which is why it builds so much social housing, kindergartens and other social infrastructure such as schools.

Thanks to Bechtle carrying the project out in the background, the end user was mostly blissfully unaware of what was happening. Everything went according to plan. There was only one weekend of downtime, and the server was available the next day via SAP GUI as usual, but a lot faster. We’re now a lot more flexible and can deploy new SAP systems much faster than before.

Frank Thyen, Head of IT, Instone Real Estate Group AG

Their large number of projects are managed by over 400 employees, who serve as close contacts for the customers and partners. All financial work, human resources and property management is covered by SAP in combination with Microsoft products such as Office 365. The modules integrated in SAP enable flexible property and project management as well as the use of Adobe Document Services. Instone Real Estate Group AG’s SAP, which has been managed by Bechtle for many years, has a modular structure in which different components can be orchestrated to one or several SAP system landscapes, enabling them to meet all of the AG’s requirements. In order to meet future SAP requirements towards in relation to HANA, Instone kicked off an IT innovation project with the goal of migrating the previous on-premises solutions in the company-own data centre to the SAP system landscape in the cloud, which would make the environment more flexible and scalable.

Solution.

As they were already accustomed to using Office products and SAP, which is partnered with Microsoft Azure, Instone Real Estate Group decided to purchase Microsoft Azure as a cloud computing platform and prepared an Azure Tenant with Microsoft. The challenge of preparing the Azure Tenant, which includes sizing and data migration and is required for SAP to function correctly, was resolved by a team effort by Instone, Bechtle’s SAP experts and Microsoft. Instone had already hired some experts for implementation. Bechtle leveraged its extensive SAP knowledge on cloud migration to calculate the entire sizing for the virtual machines, CPU, RAM etc., while evaluating the existing SAP system and coming up with a HANA sizing. While migrating the systems, Bechtle also migrated new system landscapes that enabled the recently used Oracle database to be switched to HANA 2.0. The resources required for this switch were taken into account during the sizing of the Azure Services. The business connector, SAP router and SAP cloud connector were also migrated into the cloud landscape by Bechtle.

A series of automatisms that Bechtle has developed for SAP enable the Instone Real Estate Group AG to save more user-based Azure Cloud costs. One of these being that all test and development systems are shut down overnight. Additionally, patches are implemented automatically.

Business benefits.

By moving into the Microsoft Azure Cloud, Instone Real Estate Group AG were able to improve the entire data processing capability of their IT landscape. The company’s crucial analytical tasks for the SAP landscape are now carried out inherently faster, even though they are now only paying for the use of the systems and saving on having to maintain their own data centre and Bechtle’s integrated automatisms. The cloud can also be used location-independently, while offering high reliability for SAP systems. Bechtle’s SAP experts will continue to manage the entire SAP environment and can always be reached over various channels, enabling Instone’s IT department to focus on daily business.