Viva Health is an integrated health service provider in Indonesia, established in 2012 and operating 141 pharmacies in West Java (Bekasi), Central Java, DI Yogyakarta, East Java and Bali. The company has more than 1,000 employees serving 5 million customers annually with health products, medicines and health checks. More than half of its pharmacies have an on-site doctor, and Viva Health’s focus on “kampung” (village) areas keeps the company close to the community.
At-a-Glance
The existing on-premises infrastructure at Viva Health was reaching its limits in terms of scalability, performance and capacity. Frequent hardware outages were impacting business efficiency, and the business looked for a new platform that would improve reliability and support innovative e-commerce and telemedicine initiatives.
Working with Cloud Comrade, Viva Health migrated its SAP applications and SAP HANA databases to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications on the AWS cloud. The new cloud-based solution has increased SAP performance by 90%, almost doubling the speed of month-end financial closing and reporting. It also offers much greater stability and reliability, giving Viva Health confidence in its future expansion plans.
Reengineering for growth
To support the ongoing growth of its business, Viva Health embarked on a strategic digital transformation. The on-premises hardware running Viva Health’s SAP ERP solution was reaching its limits in terms of capacity and performance, and it was not easily scalable to meet future needs. The SAP applications were running on virtualized instances of SLES for SAP Applications, while the SAP HANA databases were hosted on dedicated appliances with limited upgrade options. Repeated failures in the server hardware underpinning the SAP applications were impacting customer service and causing internal delays during critical activities, such as month-end financial closing and reporting. Viva Health wanted to offer more comprehensive online services to customers, including e-pharmacy and telemedicine services, which would require both greater flexibility and increased availability.
Jimmy Gabriel, head of IT at Viva Health, comments: “We targeted a more scalable, reliable, available and secure platform for our SAP workloads and an infrastructure that offered higher performance.”
“SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications provides a stable, secure and high-performance platform for our most important business processes.”
Rapid, easy migration to the cloud
Viva Health looked at leading cloud vendors — including Google, Microsoft and Alibaba — for a production-ready platform for SAP in the cloud. It was most impressed by the combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SUSE technology. The company approached AWS for advice on its planned cloud migration and was introduced to Cloud Comrade, an award-winning AWS partner in Indonesia and a leader in establishing enterprise SAP environments on AWS.
Cloud Comrade helped Viva Health throughout the SAP migration. Starting with an on-premises discovery and assessment phase, they progressed through design and planning to the creation of the appropriate new virtual infrastructure on AWS. The combined project team launched and tested the non-production elements of the SAP landscape (Dev and QA) first before going live with the production environment. During the migration, Cloud Comrade upgraded Viva Health to SLES 12 Service Pack 4 for SAP Applications, providing enhanced security, performance and compliance to international standards.
The migration took just four months in total, thanks in part to the fact that SLES for SAP Applications includes most of the required binaries and packages for deploying SAP. “The combination of Cloud Comrade’s experience and the SUSE OS helped us to achieve a rapid, easy migration to AWS,” says Gabriel. “SLES for SAP Applications provides a stable, secure and high-performance platform for our most important business processes.”
Cloud Comrade now provides 24/7 support for Viva Health’s SAP landscape on AWS, working closely with SUSE to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
Fast and stable platform for business
Following the migration to SLES for SAP Applications on AWS, SAP users in the Jakarta head office, regional offices and in PBF (Warehouse) benefit from greater stability and performance for their SAP systems. Guided by the Cloud Comrade SAP Basis team, part of the migration work included the removal of obsolete data and configurations, which helped boost SAP performance. Across finance, purchasing and supply chain, users enjoy more responsive systems that are available at all times, helping Viva Health offer more reliable services to its customers.
“Upgrading our SLES environment and migrating to AWS improved our performance by 90%, and we’ve also cut the incidence of production system downtime to almost 0%,” says Gabriel. “Our month-end financial closing is almost two times faster, thanks to the reduced system disruption. And user satisfaction has risen significantly.”
With its SAP systems running on AWS, Viva Health can more easily monitor its computing resources and forecast future capacity requirements. The move to cloud provides fast and practically unlimited scalability. And with first-line support handled by Cloud Comrade on a 24/7 basis, the Viva Health team has more time to focus on internal projects and business objectives.
Looking ahead, the new environment is supporting Viva Health’s ongoing expansion into e-commerce and telemedicine, enabling customers to access medical advice from their own homes.
“Working with SUSE, AWS and Cloud Comrade is helping us to focus less on infrastructure and more on advancing the business,” concludes Gabriel.
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