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#752: Modernizing SAP with AWS
00:33:29
Discover how customer are leveraging AWS to modernize SAP systems. Tushar Srivastava (Principal Acco
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This is episode 752 of the AWS podcast, released on January 19, 2026.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the AWS Podcast. Similesh here with you. Great to have you back. And I'm joined by a very special guest. I'm joined by Tushar Srivastava, who is a principal account manager at AWS and also has done a lot of work in SAP, which is our topic today. So, Tushar, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you, Simon. It's a pleasure to be here and actually a privilege. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody who's listening.
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We never know when people are listening. This is the challenge, isn't it?
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So exactly.
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Now, the reason why you're on the show is because you've recently written a book called Modernizing SAP on aws, and that's been published by Springer Nature. So you can get it if you want to read it in more detail. But we're going to sort of dive into all things SAP because it is kind of a big thing in most people's worlds. And I think people talk about a lot and hear about it a lot, but they don't make maybe know some of the details. But before we get into that, just give us a little bit about your background, Tushar, and why you wrote this book.
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Absolutely. Thanks, Simon. So, as you mentioned, my current role is principal account manager, and I work in the retail CPG vertical in North America. But before this, I was in the worldwide specialist organization playing the role of an SAP specialist. I did that for about four years at aws, and before that I spent a few years at SAP themselves and before that a long time with an SAP consulting company. So pretty much my background has been in SAP. While I was at aws, my focus was helping customers to modernize SAP using cloud technology and how they could leverage AWS solutions, AWS services. And there was a lot of confusion around this. And when I say confusion, not in the sense what solutions to use or how to leverage the infrastructure, but there was confusion around options so customers would think, and rightly so. Oh, we've been running SAP on prem. It's working great. Why should we make the move? SAP is very critical. One false move and things could come crashing down. So there's the value. Where's the value in terms of leveraging cloud? And as I spoke to more and more customers, you know, we were jointly able to tell the story. You know, the customers also explored themselves and AWS told, you know, and back in 2020, this was an emerging area for AWS also. So we were making quite a few investments here. And though SAP and AWS had been in partnership for a long, long time, and this was SAP leveraging AWS for their internal systems. But the customers who were using SAP, you know, they were just starting to pick up that whole, I would say evolution of that journey was just starting at that point in time. So in my role, I helped simplify quite a few things for SAP customers. And when customers were running SAP, they came with a business process background. Okay, they'll talk supply chain, they'll talk financials, they'll talk manufacturing. And their big challenge was to transfer. Oh, all of a sudden you throw terms like storage and EC2 and compute and oh, even cloud.
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I mean, what is this thing you're talking about?
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Yeah, exactly. So what I did was just use an analogy and use that quite a bit in my book is maybe just take it like an onion and peel the layers, okay, just explain that what exactly is at the core and eventually tie it back to there outcomes. So the way I spoke is, hey, if you're running SAP, your goal is not, you know, just to get the brightest and shiniest infrastructure, the biggest and shiniest infrastructure, but your goal is to make SAP reliable and running smooth. And I was able to tie back all these EC2 and networking and cloud components back to those outcomes. Your reliability, your ability to serve faster, ability to do upgrades faster. So that resonated a lot with my customers. And what I ended up doing was, you know, all those learning. I had a publisher reached out and they said this is an emerging area and we would like to. And this was four years after I started at aws. So this, you've been doing it for a while? Yes. And this had kind of become a mature practice at aws. When I started, we had about four or five people in North America and now globally there are more than, I would say 200, 300 people just focused around the SAP practice. So coming back to it, when a publisher reached out, I thought, okay, that's an interesting topic. I'd never thought about writing a book. And that's how I said, okay, sure, I'll take the plunge. And it took me about a year to get it, the first draft and the refinements and everything, but that's what the output is. It talks about a customer journey and what options and what decisions customers could make. Just simplify all that for them. How can cloud be a part of your SAP botanization journey? And that whole evolution, that's what it's all about.
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And so let's step back and just for those listening, you know, I think most of us have heard of SAP and we know it's like this, this big, chunky, important thing. Yeah, but, but let's just contextualize in the context of a business. I mean, SAP is often at the very heart of what a business is doing, isn't it?
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Yes, absolutely. Now, now let's just take an example. Let's say we just start a business together, Just say, you, Simon and me, Tushar, you know, our core focus would be, you know, hey, find the product that, you know, that will serve our customers, find our customers and help them. The way we will think of back office operations, maybe we'll start with Excel spreadsheets and which is like, okay, we'll track expenses, we'll track revenues, all of that. And you know, end of the month we'll try to, you know, consolidate, reconcile all of that. That's good enough. Like, if you're working with 2, 5, 10 customers, the moment you add 100 customers, we'll probably end up using some kind of a database access database or something like that. And then if you grow further, you'll probably end up using some kind of an accounting tool because let's say now you have 10 employees, you got to do payroll, you got to report to the government. So you'll start using some low, you know, low lift tool, like accounting tool, like QuickBooks or something.
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Yeah, just by basics, sort of.
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This just like basics. Now, SAP is an evolved form of that. So little bit of background and I'll not take too much time. But you know, the way SAP started was, you know, customers were building custom software like, hey, I need payroll system. I built my own custom payroll system on mainframes or something else back in the 70s. And likewise, if you need financials, you build something custom for yourself. If you're trying to do something around manufacturing, you try to build something custom yourself. And there were these five engineers at IBM who came together and said, okay, why don't we package these standard. And we see these standard transactions that all these companies do. General ledger, accounts receivables, accounts payable. And it's not too different. Why would they want to build custom software for all of that? So they kind of packaged all of that together and that's how SAP started. This was back in 1972 or 73, I think. And from there SAP has evolved, wherein it's like the central back office of a customer where you can do your manufacturing, your accounting Your supplier relationships, your customer relationships, your payrolls, everything. And it's all interconnected in terms of, okay, if I make a payment over here to a vendor, it immediately debits from my ledger and make sure the entries are all reconciled and matched together. So that's the power of SAP, and especially customers who have global operations who operate in multiple countries with different regulations. A solution like SAP or an erp, a generic solution, enterprise resource planning solution, becomes very critical. And as you can imagine, customers are running, you know, 2 billion to 10 billion to, you know, 100 billion revenue businesses. You can just imagine the complexity of operations that they run. And that's all managed within SAP. So that's why SAP is so critical to any organization that's running it.
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And so it's big, it's important. And I guess you've got that dual challenge of it's big and in importance. Everyone's kind of a little reticent to touch it to some degree. But also, yes, because it's at the core of the business. If you don't make changes, if you don't improve, you don't make it more efficient, more powerful, what have you, then it'll actually hold the business back. So you've got this sort of dual challenges that you have to deal with. And I'm sure business leaders are like, hey, I want the better version, I want the newer thing, I want the more powerful capability.
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Absolutely. So like, you know, any other enterprise software, you're managing that trade off. Like, you know, if you're right in the middle, you're an IT manager or you're an SAP manager, you're responsible for SAP systems. On one hand your businesses want you to run faster and faster. On the other other hand, you want to make sure that while we are serving the business needs, we are making sure we are not doing anything that puts us in, you know, out of compliance. We are making sure, you know, we are addressing all cybersecurity and information security needs at the same time we are managing costs of SAP. So you know, we've all heard of that three legged stool that, you know, you can have a high quality product, you can have it fast or you can have it cheap. So it's that kind of trade off that you know, somebody who's running SAP systems, they have to manage. And for larger organizations, they're the big teams that are focused just on SAP alone. So they got to make sure that they're not overspending on licenses, they're not overspending on consulting and managed services. At the same time they're able to deliver to the business the exact everything that the solution has to offer. If there's a new solution that SAP has released, how soon can you get it in the hands of the business? And. And at the same time, you're not breaking anything. You're making sure upgrade paths are defined. You're not putting any risk into the system just because you're moving so fast and you're trying to keep things efficient. So that three things, I think all these teams who run SAP, who manage SAP, are trying to kind of manage for.
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And so in the book, you've taken, I guess, I think, quite a practical approach where you've introduced us to Nimbus Airlines, who are Nimbus Airlines, and what's the journey they're going on?
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Absolutely. So a little bit of background. So when I was approached to write this book, and I have a sales background, so I said, yes, I have a lot of stories to tell. I've been a storyteller to my customers, which is, in the sense, trying to break down complex concepts and explain that in much simpler terms, use a lot of analogies and use a lot of examples. So I reached out to a few colleagues and said, hey, you know, on the solution architecture side, can we partner together on this? Because there's a lot of technical concepts that we'll have to cover in the book. Fortunately or unfortunately, it didn't work out. So I didn't have an official co author on the book, but a couple of colleagues just said, hey, we'll help you out on the side. So then what I did was I did, I pivoted. I said, okay, I'm not going to write this like a dry technical, you know, textbook. And I'm sure those books have value for. For certain audiences. My focus was to write a book, include enough technical concepts, but tell it through the lens of a journey. So I picked, you know, Nimbus Airlines. I picked a few characters like, there's the CIO at Nimbus, and there are different people on her team. There's an AWS sales team, there's an SAP sales team, and how everybody interacts and, you know, how that whole journey progresses. Nimbus is looking to modernize their SAP systems, and they're at the same place where most of my customers were, hey, we are confused. We have so many options. Help us decide. And the whole story is how the AWS team works with the team at Nimbus Airlines and helps them look at their options, helps them evaluate, and through that process, we learn technical concepts along the way. So for me, any customer who's reading this book, or for that matter, any practitioner, they would identify a lot with the characters and the people that are talked about in the book. And eventually the technical concepts are introduced at logical steps. So just as an example, as part of the story, the CIO finally says, okay, fine, I'm willing to listen to AWS's pitch about how AWS can help in my SAP modernizer, because I don't see how Cloud fits in SAP. I mean, that's the perspective I'm taking for the cio. And that's the point where I introduce, okay, we'll do an SAP immersion day and then we go through all the technical concepts that we typically cover in the immersion day. So that's where we introduce the technical concepts. And then eventually after that, the CIO gets, you know, starts seeing things in a different light. So carrying the story.
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It's a typical sort of journey that people would go through.
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Exactly.
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The familiarity of, you know, technology is made of people and it's always about.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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And tell us more about what are you seeing as, I guess some of the biggest challenges that maybe customers think they're going to have with an SAP migration and what the reality actually is. Like, what are some of the things that maybe are actually easier than we thought versus harder than we thought?
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Absolutely. So, Simon, let me just break it down. So for a lot of customers, they're at a point in their SAP journey where they can simply move the infrastructure over to aws, which is keep the same solution set, same product set, or they can actually upgrade to the latest version of SAP, which is called S4HANA, and then do the infrastructure migration at the same time. In either cases for customers, the biggest concern that they have is would I get the same reliability and performance on the cloud that I have with my on prem infrastructure? Because SAP has some very unique requirements in terms of what kind of infrastructure is certified for running SAP workloads, where this infrastructure should be placed so that you get the best performance. And you know, if, if and because for a lot of customers, SAP runs payroll or it runs order processing. What are my disaster recovery and failover options if things were to go down? Those are the biggest concerns that people have. And once they. And, and, and because on an on prem infrastructure, these things have evolved over a period of time, they might have picked out a doctor site they think, which is, you know, safe distance from headquarters. And this would have happened over time. They would have had some very high grade Infrastructure that's running SAP and they've pre ordered some infrastructure anticipating an upgrade. And when you're starting to work in the cloud, some of those paradigms change automatically. For example, there's no like, because SAP upgrades were so expensive, customers were pre ordering hardware, you know, 18 months in advance. Yeah. So you don't, you don't have to do things like that. And that makes people a bit nervous, hey, why am I not putting this purchase requisition in to get, get the hardware in? You know, it said no. When you're on the cloud, used to.
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Having a long lead time and sort.
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Of really exactly plan it out. Long lead times the second piece where customers see a lot of, what do you say? Concerns which get addressed. Oh, we have built a lot of tools for managing our upgrades and our systems, like for example, monitoring our systems or if server capacities are being reached, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have to educate them that on the cloud a lot of these tools are available for free. You might be paying licensing for certain tools or you might have built them in house and maintaining them. On the cloud we have built a lot of these tools like your system copy tools, your serverless refresh tools, and a lot of system monitoring tools. All of these come as part of your package or as part of your infrastructure environment. And there's no cost to using those tools or running those tools. And that's where it's almost like teaching somebody to move away from riding a bike with three wheels to riding a bike with just two wheels. So they're just so scared that how this will work, but you'll figure out it's more efficient riding on two wheels, it's actually better. It's actually better. You can go faster, you can do more things. So for a lot of these customers who have built, run their operations, your SAP operations based on people and some outdated technology, for them to embrace this new technology with fewer people with larger toolset, it all of a sudden becomes a little bit of a concern that okay, how would I, you know, what would happen? So I used to get a lot of questions like what happens if. And then they'll play out a scenario and then we'll have to educate them that, okay, first up, you know, in the cloud, so for instance, what happens if my systems go down or if something happens to your data center or.
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An instance goes away.
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Yeah, for instance goes away. Exactly. That's exactly. And in the on prem world, it's a very different way of approaching, you know, if, if something were to Go down, you know, you'd have physical people, physically people going in and doing some cabling or typically your infrastructure is in the basement of your headquarters and you know, the people on shifts who are supposed to be going, going in or whatever. And then all of a sudden you have to explain, okay, when you know, within a data center, within an az, if things were to go down, there's, you know, you can do, you can set up automated failovers, you can have systems getting provisioned and for constant capacity because you're going to be using such large capacity, you don't have to do on demand, you can do reservations. So all of a sudden a lot of the preconceived notions about the cloud gets broken down as part of these conversations. And what we end up doing is we do some POCs and we kind of use some tools to migrate some sandbox environment and just show them, hey, just look at this migration. Like for instance, sometimes we would go into an immersion day and we'll say, hey, we have a three hour immersion day. Let's start your migration of this dev environment on the tool. And halfway through the immersion day we'll say, oh, the migration was actually completed. We can go back and check results and compare. So all of a sudden a lot of these forward thinking people who are responsible for SAP, they started seeing the value, they said, yes, we think this could be good. It would address my, we spoke about the three legs of this tool. It can address my cost piece because okay, you gave me a number and it's much lower than my on prem number. I can see the speed, ability to serve our customers. I can see an upgrade which used to take like three months. Now we probably can do it in three weeks. The third thing which they really want to get educated is that risk, that third leg of this tool risk. What are the risks if things were to go down? If you know, if there's a cyber attack or whatever and you know, or.
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If I need to scale up or.
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Any of those, if I need to scale up and okay, we just, you know, did an acquisition and in the old world, you know, if you knew that your customer company is going to acquire someone and there's a need for SAP systems to come up, you'll acquire capacity and people and all that like nine, ten months in advance. Here you can be quick. So from the date your company gets acquired till their SAP systems are integrated used to be a 9 month, 12 month project with a lot of consulting dollars spent. Now it can be much faster just because there's so many tools and infrastructure provisioning is so fast. In fact, for a lot of customers, getting the infrastructure provision used to be the biggest, I would say pole in the tent in the sense that used to take the most time and everything kind of relies on that built around that. Yeah, yeah. Because this infrastructure to run SAP was not standard infrastructure that, you know, you can just go to a store.
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It was big iron, big iron.
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It was complicated. Even, even the OEMs, you know, said hey, we are on a backlog, you know, if you place the order now, we can probably provision this, you know, these many months ahead. Usually, usually they were, there was pre acquisition so there was always some spare capacity acquired and kept in case or a scenario like this, like some of these smart ones did that but then you can imagine the cost to that. So all of a sudden cloud changed. Yeah, so the cloud changed those conversations. And I'm glad, you know, for the SAP world overall, you know, AWS and cloud in general has been, I would say big, I would say aspect that's fast forwarded the evolution of SAP systems quite a bit.
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I think one of the other things that's really interesting if you think about once to sort of moved SAP to the cloud and running in a cloud native type way, it's the innovation on top of that that can take place. You talk about this in the book and give us a bit of a taste of I guess what some of the innovations of running SOP on AWS does in terms of the broader business.
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Absolutely, absolutely. So for a lot of customers, you know, infrastructure is just one piece of the puzzle. So one is, you know, I modernize my infrastructure and yes, I start seeing some cost savings and things of that sort coming in. But beyond the infrastructure, there are a lot of things that the customers can do in terms of innovating with SAP on the cloud. And in theory they could do these even if their SAP systems are not on cloud. But it actually helps if your SAP systems are on the cloud all of a sudden your performance and your ROI on these investments is higher. So just to give you an example, data and analytics. So your traditional model was you had your SAP data, you had a data warehouse and you ran analytics on top of that. Now AWS offered a lot of analytics solutions. You could build a data lake, you could build a lot of connections through AppFlow and other solutions like that and all of a sud, you could get much richer analytics by leveraging your SAP data on the cloud. So that was one example and customers started seeing value of that and they Realized that, okay, if I have to leverage those innovation, those things around innovation, I could technically do that with my data on prem and you know, move it to the cloud on a data lake. And some customers did that but they realized eventually it the value lies in moving our SAP systems to the cloud. There are also AI and machine learning solutions that AWS offers and these become very critical for customers running SAP. So for instance, you could be talking about some kind of IOT based applications wherein. So just to give you an example, if a customer is running manufacturing on SAP and they want to do some visual inspection of the goods coming out of the conveyor belt, the usual process was a usual method was you do some visual inspection and things of that sort. Now what you could do is you could have a camera based inspection look out for Vision, which is an AWS service. It can inspect, it can get the data feed of the products that are coming out, you can predefine what are the tolerance limits. And what it will do is it'll take collate all that data and with Genai it can get much faster and much more powerful. It can get all the data and then it can raise a quality note or an inspection note within SAP. So your SAP operator now all of a sudden knows that they're not waiting for somebody to manually inspect, walk up to their workstation, log in the defects and then the defects get reported. Now this is all happening in a closed loop system and somebody who's a quality manager all of a sudden are getting all these defect reports much faster and much quicker. So those are some of the innovation examples that customers are looking at.
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It's that ability, I guess, to integrate and to expand upon that core capability.
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Exactly. And I'll just give a couple more other examples which is more on the development side. So you have SAP development happens a lot on the ABAP development line, which is proprietary to SAP. Now AWS has an AWS SDK for SAP abap and what that means is if you are developing within aws, you could actually deploy that SDK and then you could do your ABAP development from within your AWS environment, which on the backend from a business process doesn't sound, you know, hey, where are we?
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Doesn't sound exhausting.
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Yeah, but for a lot of people on the DevOps side this is amazing because now I'm not switching between environments if I have to do SAP development or if you're developing something, it's just one thing, it's just one environment. One other example which has been a recent one Which I think would be very exciting for listeners, is around exception processing within SAP. And this is leveraging a lot of our gen AI based tools like Bedrock and Strands Agents. And what it does is basically like SAP, as we spoke earlier, is a tool or is a solution that does automated processing of your transactions. So for instance, if a customer or a vendor invoice comes in, there's a check and then the invoice gets paid against, you know, this matching done. Now sometimes they don't get paid and they error out for certain reason. You know, maybe there was a certain field missing or there was some other issue with the invoice. So what Happens is despite 100 transactions that were processed, maybe there are 10 transactions that error out. And then manually somebody has to go in and figure out what was the issue and fix it all up. What we've been able to do with our exception processing, which is we use a Genai based tool and what we are able to do is if somebody can write down a standard operating procedure that if there's an error, these are the steps we follow, we feed that into the tool and the tool can go and look at if there are emails coming or if there's some other ways that this information is reaching. The clerks who are actually processing the tool can read those emails, understand what fix needs to be done, and as an agent it can go in, login into SAP and go ahead and process that invoice and you can control the threshold that as if the invoice amount is below X amount of dollars, go ahead and process it. If it's between this and this, I want a human to be involved for approval and if it's above a certain amount, we just error it out again. And then this needs a human person to kind of evaluate the whole thing. So all of a sudden these 10 errors that somebody had to process manually, you maybe reduced it to two because the eight of them you could just were automatically handled, automatically handled through an agent. So it's innovation like these. And, and again, technically somebody could argue that, okay, my SAP system infrastructure is still on prem and I could still use solutions like these from aws. Technically, yes, but then all of a sudden you're dealing with a lot of latency and other kind of issues. So if your SAP systems were on the cloud, all of a sudden it opens up a door of so much innovation that you could do. And frankly a lot of these innovation ideas have come from customers themselves. So once they started seeing the value of that. Yeah, yeah, they came up with examples. Okay, yeah, and we, you know, back in the day, we used to host some user groups where we brought customers together and they used to share examples of, okay, we did this. And, you know, we have, after we've gone to the cloud, a couple of our engineers built a small utility to manage certain operations. So there's a lot of, I would say, community around, leveraging AWS for further enhancing and further evolving or modernizing your SAP systems.
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B
Amazing. So, Trisha, I mean, obviously this is a huge subject worthy of a book, you could say, and luckily you've written us one. How do people get hold of your book? Where can they find it?
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So the easiest thing is they can go and search my name on Amazon, you know, our favorite shopping center, and they can just look up my name, they can look up the title of the book and you'll find it. And there's also. The book is available directly from the publisher's website. Unfortunately, there's no audio version of the book. There's an ebook, which is a PDF and of course there's a physical book. Fantastic.
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I have to get you working on audio version.
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Maybe, maybe I should tell my publisher.
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B
I think an audio version.
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A lot of people have asked me, is there an audio version available? And I said, unfortunately, Springer does not have an audio version on this. But yeah, that's what could be your next project. Maybe, maybe, maybe it could be. And Simon, I just want to share a couple of thoughts here. When I started writing this book, I thought the technical pieces are going to be the big, challenging, big rocks. And yes, they were. I realized that. But. But the good thing was I could talk to a colleague, I could do my research, I could collect a lot of information and I could synthesize it. But the bigger challenge, which personally for me was more satisfying, was to write the story around it. And a lot of the characters in this book are people I've met in life, people I've worked with professionally and trying to describe all of that. So, for example, I wrote a chapter where our characters, these are AWS folks who go in to the headquarters of Nimbus Airlines and they have a meeting there. And I had somebody read this chapter. They said, this is great, but you have not described to me what this office looks like. And I'm not able to connect all that much. So I had to spend a lot of time figuring out, okay, they walk in, they, there's an office space. I would imagine what, you know, an airline, you know, which is. It's a leader in their industry. How would the headquarter look like. So I made up, you know, there's all imagination that, okay, there was an old vintage plane right outside in display. This was the first plane that ever flew. And there were old uniforms that were on display. There was a little museum. You could buy some memorabilia. And the hallways were huge. And in fact, it's in the book. And the meeting rooms were named after airline terminology. So tarmac takeoff, touchdown service or something like that.
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Yeah, things you normally say.
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Exactly. So the conference rooms, I imagine, were named after things like this. And then I had my reader proofread it again. I said, what do you think about it now? And they say, yes, the meeting itself was good, but the way you describe the environment and all of that, you know, it certainly makes things real. And the reader feels now I'm in there with them. So I think that was my big learning and I'm glad I was able to incorporate that. A lot of people who have read the book have said the storytelling is incredible and that helps them relate with the subject matter even more so. Personally, I get a lot of satisfaction from that aspect.
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B
That sounds like it's been a journey for yourself as well. So the book is called Modernizing SAP with aws. And of course, the author is Tushar Srivastava, and there'll be a link in the show notes as well. Tushar, thanks for coming on and demystifying a little bit more about SAP for us.
- [33:15]
A
Thank you, Simon. It was a pleasure coming here and thanks for having me here.
- [33:19]
B
No worries. And thanks everyone for listening. We do love to get your feedback. AWSpartmazon.com is the place to do it. And until next time, keep on building.