Using AWS, Ayala Land now has lower costs, less data center maintenance, better performance, and more efficient provisioning of resources. Alipao presented to the company’s IT Steering Committee on the total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis comparing the resources required to hit the 2020 revenue goal of 40 billion pesos. The company would spend 24 percent less by using AWS cloud architecture versus on-premises, HANA-compliant hardware.

AWS architecture also helped alleviate the stress associated with unpredictable spikes in database usage. “If you run out of storage, that’s scary,” Alipao says. “I always had to track things to ensure we had the right capacity to address growth. Because of the lead time required to procure and provision new servers, we basically were oversized, meaning we had resources we didn’t need because of the fear of running out of storage. That cost of maintaining unused servers is not even factored in the 24 percent savings in our TCO analysis.”

Eliminating the need for daily database replication, which is now done automatically using CloudWatch and Lambda, has allowed Villahermosa to free up valuable resources. He has already retired 90 TB of storage in this year alone. “In terms of administration and management, my team does not have to monitor SAP for backup as much as we did before, because AWS does everything for us,” he says. "Because of this, we have retired our EMC VNX system.”

Villahermosa and his team handled most of the cloud migration on their own. “There’s so much documentation and resources available on the AWS site that we could basically learn by ourselves; it was pretty easy,” he says. Ayala Land also used AWS Support with the Business Support Plan. Villahermosa is impressed with the response time, as an AWS representative contacted him within minutes and offered thorough explanations addressing his queries.

Processing speed has also improved since migrating to SAP HANA on the AWS Cloud. Each month, the company runs an aging report on 20 mall properties, with more than 150,000 line items. With its previous system running SAP on-premises, the report took 5 days to produce, including time required for downloading and manually consolidating data. With HANA on AWS, the report is generated in just 2 minutes, thanks to the low latency offered through AWS Direct Connect and the processing power of R4 memory-optimized instances. Villahermosa has tracked average latency at 30–40 milliseconds.

Furthermore, the speed of procurement has also improved. Alipao explains that in the past, the procurement process alone could take up to two months, followed by a 45-day delivery lead time and additional time for deployment. Using AWS, new resources can be added in 24 hours if needed. Villahermosa says, “If instances are simple, I can set them up with the AWS console in as little as 4 hours.”

Ayala Land chose AWS over competitors because of the positive references it received from other AWS customers running both HANA and SAP ECC 6 —the version of SAP Ayala Land used prior to HANA. The flexibility of AWS offerings was also a deciding factor, with options designed for any size of business. “AWS allows you to start small and grow when you need it,” Alipao says. Her team is happy with their new setup and promotes SAP on AWS to other lines of business within the Ayala conglomerate.

“SAP on AWS is really the way to go,” she concludes. “It helps me sleep at night.”