#752: Modernizing SAP with AWS

0:00This is episode 752 of the AWS podcast, released on January 19th, 2026.

0:10Hello everyone and welcome back to the AWS Podcast. I'm going to share with you. Great to have you back and I'm joined by a very special guest. I'm joined by Tushar Srivastava, who is a Principal Account Manager at AWS and also has done a lot of work in SAP, which is our topic today. So Tushar, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Simon. It's a pleasure to be here and actually a privilege and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody who's listening. We never know when people are listening. This is the challenge, isn't it? So, uh, exactly. Now, the reason why you're on the show is because you've recently written a book called Modernizing SAP on AWS, and that's been published by Springer Nature.

0:45So you can get it if you want to read it in more detail, but we're going to sort of dive into all things SAP, because it is kind of a big thing in most people's worlds. And I think people talk about it a lot and hear about it a lot, but they don't maybe know some of the details. But before we get into that, just give us a little bit about your background to show and why you wrote this book. Absolutely. Thanks, Simon. So as you mentioned, my current role is principal account manager, and I work in the retail CPG vertical in North America. But before this, I was in the worldwide specialist organization playing the role of an SAP specialist.

1:21I did that for about four years at AWS. And before that, I spent a few years at SAP themselves, and before that, a long time with an SAP consulting company. So pretty much my background has been in SAP. While I was at AWS, my focus was helping customers to modernize SAP using cloud technology and how they could leverage AWS solutions, AWS services. And there was a lot of confusion around this. And when I say confusion, not in the sense, you know, what solutions to use or how to leverage the infrastructure, but there was confusion around options. So customers would think, and rightly so, oh, we've been running SAP on-prem, it's working great, why should we make the move?

2:08SAP is very critical, one false move, and things could come crashing down. So where's the value? Where's the value in terms of leveraging cloud? And as I spoke to more and more customers, we were jointly able to tell the story. You know, the customers also explored themselves and AWS told, you know, and back in 2020, this was an emerging area for AWS also. So we were making quite a few investments here. And though SAP and AWS had been in partnership for a long, long time, and this was SAP leveraging AWS for their internal systems, but the customers who were using SAP, you know, they were just starting to pick up that whole, I would say, evolution of that journey was just starting at that point in time.

2:58So in my role, I helped simplify quite a few things for SAP customers. And when customers were running SAP, they came with a business process background. Okay, they'll talk supply chain, they'll talk financials, they'll talk manufacturing. And their big challenge was to translate, oh, all of a sudden you throw terms like storage and EC2 and compute and - Oh, and the cloud. I mean, what is this thing you're talking about? Exactly. So what I did was, just to use an analogy and use that quite a bit in my book, is maybe, you know, just take it like an onion and peel the layers. Okay, just explain that, you know, what exactly is at the core and eventually tie it back to their outcomes.

3:42So the way I spoke is, hey, if you're running SAP, your goal is not just to get the brightest and shiniest infrastructure, the biggest and shiniest infrastructure, but your goal is to make SAP reliable and running smooth. And I was able to tie back all the ZC2 and networking and cloud components back to those outcomes, your reliability, your ability to serve faster, ability to do upgrades faster. So that resonated a lot with my customers. And what I ended up doing was, you know, all those learnings I had, a publisher reached out and they said, this is an emerging area and we would like to, and this was four years after I started at AWS.

4:24So this has been doing it for a while. Yes. And this had kind of become a mature practice at AWS. When I started, we had about four or five people in North America. And, you know, and now globally, there are more than I would say 200, 300 people just focused around the SAP practice. So coming back to it, when a publisher reached out, I thought, okay, that's an interesting topic. I'd never thought about writing a book. And that's how I said, okay, sure, I'll take the plunge. And it took me about a year to get it, the first draft and the refinements and everything. But that's what the output is.

5:00It talks about a customer journey and what options and what decisions customers could make. Just simplify all that for them. how can cloud be a part of your SAP modernization journey and that whole evolution? That's what it's all about. And so let's step back and just for those listening, you know, I think most of us have heard of SAP and we know it's like this big, chunky, important thing. Yeah. But let's just contextualize in the context of a business. I mean, SAP is often at the very heart of what a business is doing, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. Now, let's just take an example. Let's say we just start a business together, just say you, Simon, and me, Tashar, you know, our core focus would be, you know, hey, find the product that, you know, that will serve our customers, find our customers and help them.

5:51The way we will think of back office operations, maybe we'll start with Excel spreadsheets, and which is like, okay, we'll track expenses, we'll track revenues, all of that. And, you know, end of the month, we'll try to, you know, consolidate, reconcile all of that. that's good enough like if you're working with two five ten customers the moment you had 100 customers will probably end up using some kind of a database access database or something like that and then if you grow further you'll probably end up using some kind of an accounting tool because let's say now you have 10 employees you got to do payroll you got to report to the government so you'll start using some low uh you know low lift tool like accounting tool like quickbooks or something like that.

6:30Yeah, just like basics. Just like basics. Now, SAP is an evolved form of that. So a little bit of background, and I'll not take too much time, but the way SAP started was, customers were building custom software. Like, hey, I need payroll system. I built my own custom payroll system on mainframes or something else back in the 70s. And likewise, if you need financials, you build something custom for yourself. If you're trying to do something around manufacturing, you try to build something custom yourself. And there were these five engineers at IBM who came together and said, okay, why don't we package these standard?

7:06And we see these standard transactions at all these companies, so general ledger, accounts receivables, accounts payables, and it's not too different. Why would they want to build custom software for all of that? So they kind of packaged all of that together and that's how SAP started. This was back in 1972 or 73, I think. And from there, SAP has evolved wherein it's like the central back office of a customer where you can do your manufacturing, your accounting, your supply relationships, your customer relationships, your payrolls, everything. And it's all interconnected in terms of, okay, if I make a payment over here to a vendor, it immediately debits from my ledger and make sure the entries are all reconciled and matched together.

7:52So that's the power of SAP and especially customers who have global operations who operate in multiple countries with different regulations, a solution like SAP or an ERP, a generic solution, enterprise resource planning solution, becomes very critical. And as you can imagine, customers are running 2 billion to 10 billion to 100 billion revenue businesses. You can just imagine the complexity of operations that they run, and that's all managed within SAP. So that's why SAP is so critical to any organization that's running it. And so it's big, it's important. And I guess you've got that dual challenge of it's big in importance.

8:33Everyone's kind of a little reticent to touch it to some degree. But also, because it's at the core of the business, if you don't make changes, if you don't improve, if you don't make it more efficient or powerful, what have you, then it'll actually hold the business back. So you've got this sort of dual challenges that you have to deal with. And I'm sure business leaders are like, hey, I want the better version. I want the newer thing. I want the more powerful capability. Absolutely. So like, you know, any other enterprise software, you're managing that trade-off. Like, you know, if you're right in the middle, you're a 90 manager or you're an SAP manager, you're responsible for SAP systems.

9:09On one hand, your businesses want you to run faster and faster. On the other hand, you want to make sure that while we are serving the business needs, we are making sure we are not doing anything that puts us in you know out of compliance we're making sure you know we're addressing all cyber security and information security needs at the same time we are managing costs of sap so you know we've all heard of that three-legged stool that you know you can have a high quality product you can have it fast or you can have it cheap so it's it's that kind of trade-off that you know somebody who's running sap systems they have to manage.

9:45And for larger organizations, there are the big teams that are focused just on SAP alone. So they've got to make sure that they're not overspending on licenses, they're not overspending on consulting and managed services. At the same time, they're able to deliver to the business the exact everything that the solution has to offer. If there's a new solution that SAP has released, how soon can you get it in the hands of the business? and at the same time you're not breaking anything. You're making sure upgrade paths are defined. You're not putting any risk into the system just because you're moving so fast and you're trying to keep things efficient.

10:22So that three things, I think all these teams who run SAP, who manage SAP, are trying to kind of manage for. And so in the book, you've taken, I guess, I think quite a practical approach where you've introduced us to Nimbus Airlines. Who are Nimbus Airlines and what's the journey they're going on? Absolutely. So a little bit of background. So when I was approached to write this book, and I have a sales background, so I said, yes, I have a lot of stories to tell. I've been a storyteller to my customers, which is in the sense trying to break down complex concepts and explain that in much simpler terms, use a lot of analogies and use a lot of examples.

11:08So I reached out to a few colleagues and said, hey, you know, on the solution architecture side, can we partner together on this? Because there's a lot of technical concepts that we'll have to cover in the book. Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn't work out. So I didn't have an official co-author on the book, but a couple of colleagues just said, hey, we'll help you out on the side. So then what I did was I did, I pivoted. I said, okay, I'm not going to write this like a dry technical, you know, textbook. And I'm sure those books have value for certain audiences. My focus was to write a book, include enough technical concepts, but tell it through the lens of a journey.

11:48So I picked, you know, Nimbus Airlines. I picked a few characters like there's the CIO at Nimbus, and there are different people on her team. There's an AWS sales team. There's an SAP sales team and how everybody interacts and, you know, how that whole journey progresses, where Nimbus is looking to modernize their SAP systems. And they're at the same place where most of my customers were, hey, we're confused. We have so many options, help us decide. And the whole story is how the AWS team works with the team at Nimbus Airlines and helps them look at their options, helps them evaluate and through that process we learn technical concepts along the way so um for me the any customer who's reading this book or for that matter any practitioner they would identify a lot with the characters and the people that are talked about in the book and eventually um the technical concepts are introduced at logical steps so just as an example uh the as part of the story you know the the cio finally says okay fine i'm willing to listen to aws's pitch about how aws can help in my sap modernizer because i don't see how cloud fits in sap i mean that's the perspective i'm taking for the cio and that's the point where i introduce uh okay we'll do an sap immersion day and then we go through all the technical concepts that we typically cover in the immersion day so that's where we introduce the technical concepts and then eventually you know after that, the CIO starts seeing things in a different light.

13:23So carrying the story - It's a typical sort of journey that people would go through. Exactly. The familiarity of, you know, technology is made of people and it's always about the people. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And tell us more about what are you seeing as, I guess, some of the biggest challenges that maybe customers think they're going to have with an SAP migration and what the reality actually is? Like, what are some of the things that maybe are actually easier than we thought versus harder than we thought? Absolutely. And so Simon, let me just break it down. So for a lot of customers, they're at a point in their SAP journey where, you know, they can simply move the infrastructure over to AWS, which is keep the same solution set, same product set, or they can actually upgrade to the latest version of SAP, which is called S4 HANA, and then do the infrastructure migration at the same time.

14:27In either cases, for customers, the biggest concern that they have is, would I get the same reliability and performance on the cloud that I have with my on-prem infrastructure? Because SAP has some very unique requirements in terms of what kind of infrastructure is certified for running SAP workloads, where this infrastructure should be placed so that you get the best performance. And because for a lot of customers, SAP runs payroll or it runs order processing. What are my disaster recovery and failover options if things were to go down? Those are the biggest concerns that people have.

15:13and because on an on-prem infrastructure, these things have evolved over a period of time. They might have picked out a DR site, the thing which is safe distance from headquarters, and this would have happened over time. They would have had some very high-grade infrastructure that's running SAP, and they've pre-ordered some infrastructure anticipating an upgrade. and when you're starting to work in the cloud some of those paradigms change automatically for example there's no like because sap upgrades were so expensive uh customers were pre-ordering hardware uh you know 18 months in advance yeah and so you don't you don't have to do things like that and that makes people a bit nervous hey why am i not putting this purchase requisition in to get get the hardware in you know it say no when you're on the cloud you're used to having a long Long lead time and sort of really having to plan it out.

16:08Long lead times. The second piece where customers see a lot of, what do you say, concerns which, you know, get addressed. Oh, we have built a lot of tools for managing our upgrades and our systems. Like, for example, monitoring our systems or, you know, if server capacities are being reached, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have to educate them that on the cloud, a lot of these tools are available for free. You might be paying licensing for certain tools or you might have built them in-house and maintaining them. On the cloud, we have built a lot of these tools like your system copy tools, your serverless refresh tools, and a lot of system monitoring tools.

16:51All of these come as part of your package or as part of your infrastructure environment. and there's no cost to using those tools or running those tools. And that's where it's almost like teaching somebody to move away from riding a bike with three wheels to riding a bike with just two wheels. So they're just so scared that how this will work, but you'll figure out it's more efficient riding on two wheels. It's actually better. It's actually better. You can go faster. You can do more things. So for a lot of these customers who have built, run their operations, your SAP operations based on people and some outdated technology, for them to embrace this new technology with fewer people, with larger tool set, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit of a concern that, okay, what would happen?

17:48So I used to get a lot of questions like, what happens if, and then they'll play out a scenario, and then we'll have to educate them that, okay, first up, you know, in the cloud. So for instance, what happens if my systems go down or if, you know, something happens to your data center? Or an instance goes away. For instance, goes away. Exactly. That's exactly. And in the on-prem world, it's a very different way of approaching, you know, if something were to go down, you know, you'd have physically people going in and doing some cabling. or typically your infrastructure is in the basement of your headquarters.

18:22And, you know, the people on shifts were supposed to be going in or whatever. And then all of a sudden you have to explain, okay, when, you know, within a data center, within an AZ, if things were to go down, there's, you know, you can set up automated failovers. You can have systems getting provisioned. And for constant capacity, because you're going to be, you know, using such large capacity, you don't have to do on-demand. You can do reservations. So all of a sudden, a lot of the preconceived notions about the cloud gets broken down as part of these conversations. And what we end up doing is we do some POCs and we kind of use some tools to migrate some sandbox environment and just show them, hey, just look at this migration.

19:05Like, for instance, sometimes we would go into an immersion day and we'll say, hey, we have a three hour immersion day. Let's start your migration of this dev environment on the tool. and halfway through the immersion, they will say, oh, the migration was actually completed. We can go back and check results and compare. So all of a sudden, you know, a lot of these forward thinking people who are responsible for SAP, they started seeing the value. They said, yes, we think this could be, you know, this could be good. It would address my, you know, we spoke about the three legs of the stool. It can address my cost piece because, okay, you gave me a number and it's much lower than my on-prem number, I can see the speed, you know, ability to serve our customers.

19:48I can see we can, an upgrade which used to take like three months now, we probably can do it in three weeks. And the third thing which they really want to get educated is that risk, that third leg of the stool, risk. What are the risks? If things were to go down, if, you know, if there's a cyber attack or whatever, and, you know. Or if I need to scale up or any other stuff. If I need to scale up and, And, okay, we just, you know, did an acquisition. And in the old world, you know, if you knew that your company is going to acquire someone and there's a need for SAP systems to come up, you'll acquire capacity and people and all that, like nine, 10 months in advance.

20:28Here, you know, you can be quick, you know. So from the date your company gets acquired till their SAP systems are integrated, used to be a nine-month, 12-month project with a lot of consulting dollars spent. Now it can be much faster just because there's so many tools and infrastructure provisioning is so fast. In fact, for a lot of customers, getting the infrastructure provision used to be the biggest, I would say, pole in the tent in the sense that used to take the most time and everything kind of relied on. It was built around that, yeah. Yeah, because this infrastructure to run SAP was not standard infrastructure that you can just go to a store and buy.

21:04It was big iron. Big iron, it was complicated. Even the OEMs said, hey, we're on a backlog. If you place the order now, we can probably provision this these many months ahead. So usually there was pre-acquisition. So there was always some spare capacity acquired and kept just in case for a scenario like this. Like some of these smart ones did that. But then you can imagine the cost to that. So all of a sudden, cloud changed. Yeah, so the cloud changed those conversations. And I'm glad for the SAP world overall, AWS and cloud in general has been, I would say, a big aspect that's fast-forwarded the evolution of SAP systems quite a bit.

21:53I think one of the other things that's really interesting if you think about once to move SAP to the cloud and running in a cloud-native type way, it's the innovation on top of that that can take place. You talk about this in the book and give us a bit of a taste of, I guess, what some of the innovations of running SOP on AWS does in terms of the broader business. Absolutely. Absolutely. So for a lot of customers, you know, infrastructure is just one piece of the puzzle. So one is, you know, I modernize my infrastructure and yes, I start seeing some cost savings and things of that sort coming in.

22:32But beyond the infrastructure, there are a lot of things that the customers can do in terms of innovating with SAP on the cloud. And in theory, they could do these even if their SAP systems are not on cloud. But it actually helps if your SAP systems are on the cloud. All of a sudden, your performance and your ROI on these investments is higher. So just to give you an example, data and analytics. So your traditional model was, you know, you had your SAP data, you had a data warehouse, and you ran analytics on top of that. Now, AWS offered a lot of analytics solutions. You could build a data lake.

23:13You could build a lot of connections through AppFlow and other solutions like that. And all of a sudden, you could get much richer analytics by leveraging your SAP data on the cloud. So that was one example. and customers started seeing value of that. And they realized that, okay, if I have to leverage those innovation, those things around innovation, I could technically do that with my data on-prem and move it to the cloud on a data lake. And some customers did that, but they realized eventually the value lies in moving our SAP systems to the cloud. There are also AI and machine learning solutions that AWS offers.

23:56and these become very critical for customers running SAP. So for instance, you could be talking about some kind of IoT-based applications. So just to give you an example, if a customer is running manufacturing on SAP and they want to do some visual inspection of the goods coming out of the conveyor belt, the usual process was, the usual method was, you do some visual inspection and things of that sort. now what you could do is you could have a camera-based inspection look out for vision which is an aws service it can inspect it can get the data feed of the products that are coming out you can pre-define what are the tolerance limits and what it will do is it'll collate all that data and with gnai it can get much faster and much more powerful it can get all the data and then it can raise a quality note or an inspection note with an SAP.

24:54So your SAP operator now all of a sudden knows that they're not waiting for somebody to manually inspect, walk up to their workstation, log in the defects, and then the defects get reported. Now this is all happening in a closed loop system. And somebody who's a quality manager, all of a sudden are getting all these defect reports much faster and much quicker. So those are some of the innovation examples that customers are looking at. It's that ability, I guess, to integrate and to expand upon that core capability. Exactly. And I'll just give a couple more other examples, which is more on the development side.

25:35So you have SAP development happens a lot on the ABAP development line, which is proprietary to SAP. Now, AWS has an AWS SDK for SAP ABAP. And what that means is if you are developing within AWS, you could actually deploy that SDK and then you could do your ABAP development from within your AWS environment, which on the back end of the business process doesn't sound, you know, hey, where are we? Doesn't sound exciting. Yeah, but for a lot of people on the DevOps side, this is amazing because now I'm not switching between environments of have to do SAP development or, you know, if you're developing something.

26:19It's just one thing. It's just one environment. One other example, which has been a recent one, which I think would be very exciting for our listeners, is around exception processing within SAP. And this is leveraging a lot of our Gen AI-based tools like Bedrock and Strands Agents. And what it does is basically like SAP, as we spoke earlier, is a tool or is a solution that does automated processing of your transactions. So, for instance, if a customer or vendor invoice comes in, there's a check and then the invoice gets paid against this matching done. Now, sometimes they don't get paid and they error out for a certain reason.

27:03You know, maybe there was a certain field missing or there was some other issue with the invoice. So what happens is despite, you know, 100 transactions that were processed, maybe there are 10 transactions that error out and then manually somebody has to go in and figure out what was the issue. Fix it all up. And fix it all up. What we've been able to do with our exception processing, which is we use a Gen AI-based tool, and what we are able to do is if somebody can write down a standard operating procedure that if there's an error, these are the steps we follow, we feed that into the tool. And the tool can go and look at if there are emails coming or if there's some other ways that this information is reaching the clerks we're actually processing.

27:48The tool can read those emails, understand what a fix needs to be done. And as an agent, it can go in, log in into SAP and go ahead and process that invoice. And you can control the threshold that as if the invoice amount is below X amount of dollars, go ahead and process it. If it's between this and this, I want a human to be involved for approval. And if it's above a certain amount, you know, we just error it out again. And then, you know, this needs a human person to kind of evaluate the whole thing. So all of a sudden, these 10 errors that somebody had to process manually, you maybe reduced it to two because the eight of them you could just process.

28:26Automatically handled. Automatically handled through an agent. So it's innovation like these. And again, technically somebody could argue that, okay, my SAP system infrastructure is still on-prem and I could still use solutions like these from AWS. Technically, yes, but then all of a sudden you're dealing with a lot of latency and other kinds of issues. So if your SAP systems were on the cloud, all of a sudden it opens up a door of so much innovation that you could do. And frankly, a lot of these innovation ideas have come from customers themselves. So once they started seeing the value of SAP on the cloud.