SAP is a core workload for many enterprises across the country and the world. In fact, many might consider it the poster child for mission-critical workloads and applications. And many enterprises are starting to run SAP on Amazon Web Services, building on a decade-old relationship between SAP and AWS and accelerating the shift to SAP HANA on cloud-native architecture.

Fernando Castillo (pictured, left), head of worldwide SAP at AWS, and Steven Jones (pictured, right), director of EC2 at AWS, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed SAP workloads, customers needs and the migration to AWS. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

What’s going on with SAP on AWS?

Jones: A lot of customers continue to migrate these mission-critical workloads to AWS. And a good example is the U.S. Navy. They moved their entire SAP Landscape ERP workload to AWS. This is a very large system. It supports over 72,000 users across six different Navy commands. They estimate that $70 billion worth of parts and goods actually transact through the system every year. Just massive. And … this type of adoptions continue to accelerate at a very rapid clip.

Today over 5,000 customers now are running SAP workloads on AWS. And they’re really trusting us to manage and run these workloads. And another interesting stat here is that more than half of these customers are actually running SAP HANA, which is SAP’s flagship in-memory database.

Fernando, when you are talking to customers, are you discerning any common patterns that are emerging?  

Castillo: Our biggest customers are doing complete SAP transformations. Other customers have immediate needs, and they’re taking their existing assets to AWS — so looking through a use case for core performances, but also to sell them on a platform innovation. And this innovation is something that’s aspirational, not something that can wait. They need it now. The time to innovate is now.

Jones: And some are looking to really reap the benefits of the investments they’ve made over the last couple of decades sometimes. And Vista is a really good example here. They’re a subsidiary of Coke Industries. They migrated and moved their existing SAP … solution called ECC to AWS. They estimate that this migration alone, from an infrastructure cost-savings perspective, has netted them about $2 million per year.

How does AWS specifically compare to some of your other competitors as it relates to supporting SAP workloads?

Jones: Customers do tell us that security, performance, availability matters, especially for this workload, which to be honest is the backbone of many, many organizations. Even a single hour of unplanned downtime as it relates to this particular workload could cost millions. And so it’s super important. And if you look at publicly available data from an outage perspective, AWS has considerably less downtime than the other hyperscalers out there.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: The AWS Partner Network sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE