Corfo migrated its SAP solutions to Azure transparently to users.

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Since 2005, the operation of Corfo’s SAP solutions has been in the hands of Novis. In 2020, this important Chilean institution decided to carry out two projects: SAP upgrade and the migration of all its solutions to Azure. Novis was the company responsible for this process. In this article we discuss the rationale, the challenges faced, and the results achieved.

What is Corfo?

Corfo (www.corfo.cl) is the Economic Development agency of the Chilean Government, under the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism, and its role is to promote entrepreneurship, innovation, and competitiveness in the country, along with strengthening human capital and technological capabilities.

One of its fundamental objectives is to become a world-class agency to achieve the goals established in its mission, by collaboratively associating productive ecosystems and sectors with high potential, to project Chile towards the new knowledge economy of the 21^st century, providing thus more opportunities to its inhabitants and consolidating economic growth.

The SAP migration to Azure project

Jorge Rojas Medina, IT Manager at Corfo, explains the project’s genesis: “The service contract for SAP solutions operational continuity and functional support was about to expire early in 2021. So, during 2020 we called for tenders, indicating in the RFP that we desired to migrate to a public cloud, in accordance with the strategic plan, for this is the IT guideline for all Corfo systems. We wanted to have the entire IT infrastructure as a service, avoiding thus having to make investments and worrying about technology obsolescence, and as an additional advantage we foresaw cost reductions. We already had Office 365 and other services like the Intranet in public clouds. Novis offered us Azure and it was selected as the best proposal.”

The SAP solutions migration project began by the end of December 2020 and one of its main challenges was to fulfill a condition clearly established in the RFP: the migration to the cloud had to be done in no more than four days.

The project’s objectives set by Corfo were as follows:

• Keep up to date with the latest innovations that could add value to Corfo.
• Implement SAP ERP and Portal landscapes on Azure Cloud.
• Have a flexible and scalable infrastructure.
• Improve the productive environments (RTO and RPO*) recovery times.

A project team was defined to do all of this, comprised by key Corfo users from the Purchases, Financial Control, Accounting, Treasury, Budget, and Human Resources areas, who would conduct the functional tests. Corfo’s IT Management and a Novis expert team would be in charge of the coordination.

Jorge Rojas evaluates the results satisfactorily: “We met the established deadlines and the migration of productive was done during a weekend, by the end of February, without setbacks and transparently to users”.

He states that the continuity has been total, and everything has been transparent from the users’ point of view, “we haven’t had any problems”. He assesses that the good results are because the upgrade project was done previously in 2020, and this served as a preparation. “On that occasion, a detailed inventory of all legacy systems connected with SAP was compiled. One advantage was that ours is a standard configuration, we have few Z programs. Users defined their own testing plans and applied them again in the migration to Azure. Both projects turned out exactly as planned”, he explains.

Regarding Novis’ services, he declares to be very satisfied. “We have the advantage that now Novis is the sole technical liaison with SAP and provides us with an excellent service at a reasonable price. It is a proactive, silent service that works well. Whenever an issue needs to be escalated to SAP, it is handled directly by Novis. If there are any alarms to attend to, we don’t even hear about it, they solve everything. We have an optimal service in Corfo, SAP works well all the time, and our users appreciate this”.

Fell free to contact us for more information about Novis services.

Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin editor.

* Note: RTO and RPO refer to the tangible data loss between the backup copy and an incident. RTO refers to the time it takes to solve the incident before all systems may work normally.