Boulanger: migrating its SAP landscape to Microsoft Azure with zero business impact

The Challenge

In evaluating its legacy datacenter hardware, Boulanger needed to migrate its entire SAP landscape; connecting applications critical to the operations of its Retail, Location, Production and Electro Dépôt subsidiaries, as well as the group's HR information system. This would need to be carefully managed to mitigate against significant impact to the business and its services across the group's 10,000 SAP users.

The Solution

Building on a first Cloud Azure migration, carried out in 2020 for Boulanger, and an SAP S/4HANA on Azure proof of concept delivered in 2021 for Belgian subsidiary KREFEL, Talan led the migration of Boulanger's SAP ERP landscape to Azure across the Retail, Location, Production, and Electro Dépôt subsidiaries, as well as the group's HR information system in just one year. The project also included managed services and ongoing operational maintenance of the SAP infrastructure and applications.

The Impact

The migration was completed seamlessly, with no interruption to the business day-to-day operations. This included 8 go-lives delivered in one year, including 2 major releases for the store information systems. It optimized and modernized the infrastructure on Azure, improved visibility into infrastructure costs, and delivered gains in agility and overall performance for a group with €3.8 billion in revenue and 8,000 employees.