Blue Ocean Systems has reaped a range of rewards from deploying SAP Business One with an SAP HANA database on the AWS Cloud. The Blue Ocean Systems service received a considerable boost in October 2016 when SAP began a campaign to bring customers in Southeast Asia onto the SAP Business One HANA Trial. “Once SAP kicked off the campaign, our service took on a life of its own,” says Devan. “Thanks largely to the AWS infrastructure, we scaled seamlessly to take on 400 new customers in just six weeks - considerably more than our expectation of 100 to 120 new customers in three months.” Each customer was provisioned in just 20 minutes rather than the 5-to-10 days Devan believes would have been required in a traditional infrastructure.

Being able to choose memory optimized Amazon EC2 instances on AWS enables Blue Ocean Systems to support more customers on the r4.16xlarge instance and achieve a lower cost per customer, which Devan describes as “crucial to the success of the campaign.” The AWS r4.16xlarge instance supported the SAP standard allocation of about 4 GB RAM per customer in Blue Ocean Systems’ SAP HANA in-memory database environment.

“The larger the instance type we used, the more of these 4 GB RAM blocks we could allocate and the greater the efficiencies we could achieve,” explains Devan. “The Intel architecture supporting the AWS r4.16xlarge instances and the instances themselves enabled us to optimize our EC2 usage to lower our AWS costs by 25 percent.” AWS enabled Blue Ocean to future-proof it's investment and quickly deploy SAP HANA 2.0 on AWS r4.16xlarge instances.

Devan is emphatic that Blue Ocean Systems could never have launched the service in a traditional data center. “We would have had no idea how much hardware we would need to invest in upfront in that environment,” he says. “Deploying this service was only possible on an all-in-one platform that could ramp up with support from SAP and AWS.”

Blue Ocean Systems is also meeting the availability requirements for systems that customers relied on for business-critical activities such as finance and procurement. The business is achieving infrastructure availability of 99.95 percent for the SAP Business One HANA system running on AWS, which Devan describes as “higher than our customers would be expecting.”

Devan is excited about the benefits AWS can provide beyond those achieved to date. “SAP HANA and the overwhelming power of in-memory technologies are delivering business intelligence and ERP systems to businesses on a single platform,” he says. “Delivering these technologies on the AWS Cloud means we can provision compute and associated resources in minutes and take advantage of a much more budget-friendly operating expenditure model.

“We can also offer highly competitive user-based pricing that enables businesses with as few as one or two customers to gain access to enterprise-class ERP and business intelligence capabilities.”

Blue Ocean Systems is now poised to expand its service into markets beyond Southeast Asia, including Japan, Australia and New Zealand. “AWS has enabled us to provide a competitive SAP Business One system with SAP HANA to the market and gives us a powerful platform to extend regionally and beyond,” says Devan. “We are extremely pleased with the capabilities and performance of the AWS Cloud.”