Inmarsat is the world leader in global, mobile satellite communications. It owns and operates the world’s most diverse global portfolio of mobile telecommunications satellite networks, and holds a multi-layered, global spectrum portfolio, covering L-band, Ka-band, and S-band, enabling unparalleled breadth and diversity in the solutions it provides. Inmarsat’s long-established global distribution network includes not only the world’s leading channel partners but also its own strong direct retail capabilities, enabling end to end customer service assurance.
The company has an unrivalled track record of operating the world’s most reliable global mobile satellite telecommunications networks, sustaining business and mission critical safety & operational applications for more than 40 years. It is also a major driving force behind technological innovation in mobile satellite communications, sustaining its leadership through a substantial investment and a powerful network of technology and manufacturing partners.
Inmarsat operates across a diversified portfolio of sectors with the financial resources to fund its business strategy and holds leading positions in the Maritime, Government, Aviation and Enterprise satcoms markets, operating consistently as a trusted, responsive, and high-quality partner to its customers across the globe.
Accelerating Cloud Adoption
Inmarsat’s finance, supply chain, and procurement functions on SAP ERP were running on their premises. The infrastructure had served them well for over a decade and they wanted to accelerate their cloud adoption in alignment with their strategy. A due diligence study was conducted with Infosys and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to identify an optimized approach to the cloud environment for better reliability, security, agility, and performance.
Infosys played the lead Systems Integrator role to execute this project in partnership with AWS and Inmarsat.
Navigating with Infosys
Infosys has an aptly named methodology called Safe Passage, part of Infosys Cobalt to help customers in conversion / migration projects. Infosys has an excellent rinse, repeat process to reduce the risk of migration and reduce the implementation time.
Safe passage methodology is a combination of best practices and tools which Infosys has developed with experience serving customers, which helps reduce the risks in such transformation programs.
After a series of discussions Inmarsat, Infosys and AWS agreed on the approach that included technical upgrades of their SAP systems, migrations to new operating system and database to enable migration to the cloud.
The first step factored migration of 24 systems, to AWS out of which 10 were upgraded as well. At the same time, the Operating System was to be migrated from Solaris 5.1 to Red Hat Linux 7 and the database from Oracle 11.2 to IBM DB2 11.5 for five of the systems under migration. The scope also included configuring High Availability for four systems to ensure high uptime for mission-critical applications such as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC).
Tim Brown, Senior Director, Cloud and Operations (Group IT) of Inmarsat, said “Our primary goal to move to cloud was stabilization and setting up of SAP applications on a modern environment and architecture. Infosys delivered this program successfully in an expedited seven-and-a-half-month timeline and on budget, working closely with AWS Professional Services and Inmarsat as a single team.”
Infosys delivered critical activities such as code remediation, integration testing, mock migrations to streamline the cutover, go live and ensured smooth business operations on the new platform.
Wrapping Up
It is early days, but there has been a significant reduction in maintenance and licensing costs. In the cloud, Inmarsat can scale up and down with the business, and the response times for dialogue processes for the SAP systems have improved almost 40%, while the response to SAP requests has seen an improvement of around 10%.
Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.
