Keytree helps switch apps to SAP Cloud Platform

The customer produces energy to power economic growth and lift people out of poverty. With around 74,000 employees, it operates in 70 countries worldwide: finding and producing oil and gas on land and offshore, moving energy around the globe, and manufacturing and marketing fuels and raw materials used in thousands of everyday products, from mobile phones to food packaging.

It is focused on ensuring its people have the tools and systems to work efficiently, effectively and productively wherever they are – both in the office and on the move. Working with its partners, the IT function developed a series of mobile applications that enable staff to complete tasks and operations efficiently. These had been developed on the on-premise SAP Mobile Platform. However, as it shifts to more flexible cloud-based platforms, it chose SAP Cloud Platform as the Platform as a Service for the new era of apps. This approach will enable it to leverage the flexibility the cloud offers and manage costs more efficiently with Keytree playing an essential role in switching its apps to SAP Cloud Platform.

“Working with the Keytree team, and drawing on their expertise in SAP Cloud technology, proved invaluable as we moved away from on-premise applications. The Keytree delivery methodology enabled us to migrate a selection of apps to SAP Cloud Platform quickly and efficiently.”

Customer Vice President of Enterprise Systems

Providing a flexible approach to app management

The customer has created over 25 apps; some of these apps were employee-facing used for managing leave or ordering products, while others extend the reach of the apps to its customer base and include Control of Work, Health and Safety reporting or the management of refuelling tankers and delivery trucks.

To enable rapid delivery of the migration, the project followed a “no change” mantra. Given its scale, the customer has a complex internal system landscape with many different versions of backend systems and several different ‘sign on’ mechanisms; therefore, Keytree built a ‘pattern’ approach to enable the apps to be grouped and migrated efficiently.

Keytree tackled these through ‘technical proving’ (for each app); a series of tests to check ‘sign on’ from the cloud through to all the backend systems – this approach allowed Keytree to ‘prove’ it functioned as required.

Depending on the app, Keytree designed a range of standard ways (patterns) of switching apps to the cloud and prioritised each, creating a running order based on the number of users for each app. The Keytree team worked closely with the customer as well as other partners in working through the list in priority order and moving each app to the cloud. Key to delivery was that each app had to be validated to ensure it worked in the same way as it did before the move, which was completed by an extended UAT team.

Keytree rapidly migrated existing on-premise applications to SAP Cloud Platform. The process was designed to follow a standard way to move all the apps into the cloud, with only a few minor changes made to the apps and with no impact on the end user. The move to the cloud fits perfectly into the customers IT cloud strategy, providing flexibility and cost effectiveness – and this is just the beginning of customers cloud journey.