Murum Dam, Bintuu Sarawak Borneo
Melbourne-based IT services provider Lemongrass has refitted Malaysia-headquartered Sarawak Energy’s IT infrastructure from its legacy backend to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) public cloud.
The provider, which also has delivery offices in Malaysia and the Philippines, was originally tasked with moving part of Sarawak Energy’s SAP applications to AWS to set a foundation for digital transformation and SAP consolidation.
Following a smooth initial migration, Lemongrass began phase two of the project, which consolidated a bulk of Sarawak Energy’s infrastructure and applications into an SAP-on-cloud solution.
This required the energy company to readily adapt its technical managed services, technical project resources and the underlying AWS infrastructure to accommodate a set timeline.
“When customers including Sarawak Energy embark on ... multi-phase transformations it’s important to make sure the partner not only has the technical expertise and experience required but that their approach and methods readily accommodate and allow for change,” said Jason Nicholl, Lemongrass Asia Pacific executive vice president.
“With Sarawak Energy, we maintained a very regular cadence and talked openly and transparently about what needed to change as the program itself adapted. Lemongrass understood at the outset of the partnership that phase one was predictable more from the existing hosting provider to AWS and that an SI selection would take place to deliver the SAP S/4HANA functional changes required to deliver phase two.”
Nicholl said that Lemongrass provided advice to optimise costs or accelerate the program to ensure the best outcome for Sarawak Energy.
“So many organisations still focus on migration of SAP and not on the operation of it,” he added. “The migration is months and the run is years, so it’s important to consider how you will operate in the cloud more than how you will get to the cloud.”
To help manage cloud costs, Lemongrass introduced the concept of FinOps to Sarawak Energy, alongside SecOps and DevOps.
These, alongside minimised downtime migrations and release management allow the company to turn services on and off as customers need assistance, capacity, knowledge transfers and advice.
