Siemens Smart Infrastructure, a unit of industrial giant Siemens AG that makes equipment for buildings and electricity grids, will move its mission-critical SAP applications to Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud as part of a deal announced today.

The companies divulged the agreement against the backdrop of AWS’ virtual re:Invent event.

SAP SE’s applications are used by large enterprises to manage their operations. In the case of Siemens Smart Infrastructure, the unit is using SAP’s enterprise resource planning platform and supply chain management software to support its manufacturing operations. It also relies on the applications to power other parts of its business such as sales activities.

The Siemens subsidiary is taking a gradual approach with its cloud initiative. The unit first started working with AWS five years ago and, now, it has set a goal of moving more than 20 SAP enterprise resource planning and supply chain management workloads to the cloud by the end of 2021. AWS will become Siemens Smart Infrastructure’s preferred cloud provider for SAP workloads.

There are a few different motivations behind the project. One, the companies said, is that the unit expects to realize “significant cost savings over the course of the next three years.” It also will gain the ability to use the analytics and machine learning tools available in AWS’ cloud with its SAP applications. Finally, it’s anticipated that the switch will enable the unit’s information technology team to test and deploy new technologies faster than in the colocation data centers it has been using so far.

Siemens’ long-term plans for its AWS deployment involve using HANA, a database that SAP has developed to hold information from its applications. HANA’s key selling point is an in-memory architecture that speeds up processing by keeping information in RAM and thereby avoiding the delay of having to regularly move data to and from storage. Siemens Smart Infrastructure will adopt AWS’ R5, X1 and X1e memory-optimized instance families to support the deployment. 

AWS says that more than 5,000 customers currently run SAP workloads on its cloud. 

The industrial sector in which Siemens competes came into the spotlight at re:Invent this week. AWS introduced multiple new offeirngs aimed at industrial customers during the event including Amazon Monitron and Amazon Lookout for Equipment, two services that can collect data about the health of equipment to enable use cases such as predictive maintenance. 

Photo: Siemens