CEMEX moving SAP to Microsoft Azure and SUSE Linux for better availability, performance, and lower costs

A worldwide building materials leader

Global building materials supplier CEMEX depends on efficient and reliable operation of its SAP landscape to keep the business running smoothly so that it can continue to deliver high-quality building services to its expanding international customer base. CEMEX operates in more than 50 countries, and its over 41,000 employees use SAP applications for a wide range of front-office, back-office, and business intelligence functions to drive the company’s USD13 billion in annual revenue.

Traditionally, CEMEX has run its SAP systems on servers in the company’s datacenter near its headquarters in Monterrey, Mexico. This arrangement sometimes caused some performance issues for employees in other countries, and it could be time-consuming and expensive to replace or upgrade hardware components.

“For our offices in Asia, network latency times were impacting employees’ experience, and that had a negative impact on their work,” says Juan Vazquez, IT Architect at CEMEX. “And procuring a new on-premises server required filing a request, waiting for delivery, and then setting it up. It took weeks and sometimes months, and the cost was high.”

In 2015, CEMEX embarked on a digital transformation journey to improve its customers’ experience and strengthen the existing business while also providing a solid foundation for future growth. The company realized that moving IT resources to the cloud was the best way to achieve these goals.

The right cloud platform and operating system for CEMEX

In total, CEMEX has close to 60 SAP production systems, and in the on-premises environment, the systems have been running on the IBM AIX operating system using Oracle databases. Because SAP applications are so important to CEMEX, the company needed to find exactly the right cloud platform and operating system to host them. In the end, the company decided to move to Microsoft Azure and use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (version) 15, and from Oracle to SAP HANA and SAP ASE databases.

“Choosing a cloud platform was a large effort comprising both business and IT groups,” says Vazquez. “We carefully evaluated many cloud offerings, and SAP performance was an essential element among more than 100 criteria that we had. We felt that Azure offered the best combination of performance, security, scalability, and services.”

CEMEX also had a long and positive existing relationship with Microsoft, so it knew that the deep technical expertise of Microsoft specialists would be invaluable for a project of this scope. CEMEX also appreciated the extensive resources Microsoft makes available for its customers. “Because the cloud was new for CEMEX, our internal security team was very interested in the security of Azure,” explains Vazquez. “And every time they had a question, Microsoft had a person or a piece of documentation to answer it. Ultimately, all their concerns were addressed, and they approved the move to Azure.”

AIX doesn’t run on Azure, so CEMEX knew it would also need a new operating system. The company looked at several possibilities before choosing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications. SAP itself has endorsed the platform, and CEMEX knew that the operating system has a reputation as a high-performance solution that can reduce the risk of service outages, minimize system maintenance requirements, and speed the deployment of new cloud services.

From proof of concept to successful migration

The CEMEX SAP landscape is composed of six regional instances that range from fewer than 1,000 users to more than 9,000 users. The company also runs a commercial SAP portal that has nearly 6,000 users. Key SAP workloads include ERP Central Component (ECC), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Business Warehouse (BW), and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). CEMEX has also developed a digital suite called CEMEX Go to interact with its customers, who can use the suite to connect to the company to request products or services. CEMEX Go connects to the ECC systems via SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (PI).

Before migrating any of its production systems, CEMEX started with a large proof of concept comprising 10 systems that included ECC, CRM, BW, and PI. The CEMEX deployment team did extensive functional and technical testing to ensure that all processes were well understood before touching any of the business-critical production SAP systems. The company then migrated its Asia region SAP instance.

“Our first regional migration to Azure, SUSE Linux, and SAP HANA was a big success and resulted in significant performance improvement for our employees who use SAP,” says Vazquez. “The move was really good news for the business and our employees, and it was an important first step toward our digital transformation goals.”

Following the positive results in Asia, CEMEX progressed to two systems in Europe, again moving from Oracle database to SAP HANA. Once again, the results were favorable.

The most important lesson CEMEX has learned from its migrations so far is that practice makes perfect. The migration team does several dry runs before any production migration to ensure that the process is optimized. The team has documented all this information, and that has helped expedite each successive migration. Typically, the team has had from noon on Friday to noon on Sunday to complete a production migration with minimal business impact, so efficiency is key.

“We pretty much know all the steps by heart now,” says Vazquez. “And each migration is validated by our technical team, by the functional team, and then by super users and regular users to ensure that everything is working properly. We also carefully document the state of the system before and after the migration for our security and compliance team.”

CEMEX is now working on an SAP transformation journey that will take 18 months to move SAP to Azure and at the same time perform technical upgrades and reduce its SAP IT footprint by 25 percent. This is a foundational program to consolidate digital transformation in the CEMEX operational IT backbone. 

A unified team of vendors for the job

Throughout its migration planning and implementation, CEMEX has seen tremendous benefit in the support it gets from Microsoft, SUSE, and SAP, and in the close partnerships between the three companies and the opportunities they provide to make running SAP on Azure and SUSE Linux as trouble-free as possible.

“When we have a candidate system to move to Azure, we want all the vendors to be involved in the planning and to validate the architecture,” says Vazquez. “For example, we tell the Microsoft team what the system configuration is, and they help us figure out what the equivalent would be in Azure. This gives us peace of mind that we’re migrating in the right way.”

This planning includes determining what sort of virtual machines to run for development, quality assurance, and production, according to the system’s needs, and whether it requires high availability (HA). CEMEX is currently using M-series and S-series virtual machines in Azure, and it is continually evaluating the available virtual machine options to ensure optimal performance.

When CEMEX did that first migration in Asia, it relied on teamwork between Microsoft, SUSE, and SAP to help troubleshoot some compatibility issues. “When we first migrated, there was an incompatibility between the version of SUSE Linux, the type of virtual machine, and the version of SAP,” explains Vazquez. “We got all three vendors involved, and we were able to resolve the problem and get the production system into Azure on schedule. That wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for the close relationship between the companies.”

For Vazquez, an important source of value in these vendor relationships is that information isn’t siloed within each separate vendor. They share knowledge, so each vendor knows how to make its products work best with those of the others. “All three vendors help us put the puzzle pieces together, so we end up with a complete picture of how to make each migration successful,” says Vazquez. “What’s great is that we know we’re not alone in this effort—Microsoft, SUSE, and SAP are always working together to help us. We’re a demanding customer, but they’re up to the task.”

CEMEX also worked with Microsoft and SUSE to gain licensing advantages through Azure Hybrid Benefit, which companies can use to extend existing on-premises licenses to the cloud with no additional costs beyond virtual machine infrastructure expenses.

Future plans and current benefits

CEMEX has moved approximately 16 of its SAP systems to Azure and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, and the company plans to eventually move all its remaining SAP systems. The company has sorted its SAP systems based on criticality and the need to refresh existing on-premises hardware, and there is a list of migration candidates that will be moved over the next few years. CEMEX is also evaluating SAP S/4HANA for its Americas instance, which has a 27-terabyte database.

Along with its SAP applications, CEMEX has also been migrating non-SAP solutions to Azure, including Windows Server. The company sees major benefits in running these servers in Azure. “In the on-premises environment, we had 1,000 servers, and up to 40 percent weren’t really being used,” says Vazquez. “We were able to decommission a lot of those, which saved us money, and now that we’re in Azure, the servers are optimized to take best advantage of Azure capabilities, which provides additional economic benefits.”

The benefits of the migration have been more than just economic ones. “By moving our SAP landscape to Azure and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, we’ve significantly improved performance between 40 and 70 percent for our migrated SAP applications, streamlined our IT management workload, increased the flexibility of our infrastructure, and added new HA capabilities,” says Vazquez.

For Vazquez, the success of the effort is primarily due to planning, practice, and teamwork. “There is a learning curve, so the more thoroughly you plan and the more dry runs you do before migrating a production system, the better,” he says. “It’s also important to work closely with a team—like Microsoft, SUSE, and SAP—that can help validate your architecture. I would consider those to be the keys to having a successful migration to Azure and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.”

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