IPG's seamless cloud migration with IBM Consulting

Interpublic Group (IPG), a leading global advertising and marketing services company, sought to modernize its infrastructure by exiting its on-premises data center in Omaha, Nebraska, and migrating legacy workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This included a substantial number of workloads already running on VMware.

To facilitate this complex transition, IPG partnered with IBM Consulting, leveraging their expertise to move intricate SAP workloads to AWS and accelerate the overall data center exit. Building on a successful history of collaboration, IPG entrusted IBM Consulting to design and implement a scalable architecture tailored to their current and future needs.

IBM Consulting proposed a refactor-and-rearchitect approach, moving beyond a simple lift-and-shift migration. The team began with a sandbox migration to validate the solution before migrating on-premises SAP instances, including development, QA, and production environments with high availability and disaster recovery configurations. They also supported the migration of legacy applications to the AWS cloud.

Within four months, IPG's two largest SAP servers were migrated, with scheduling optimized to minimize disruption during significant project milestones. IBM Consulting also captured critical parameters and re-engineered several applications to enhance performance, meeting and exceeding on-premises performance benchmarks for scheduled jobs, user-submitted tasks, and operational reports. This was achieved using AWS native toolsets, allowing IPG to leverage AWS native services and propel their digital transformation at scale.

Value Results:

• Improved Performance: Achieved a 20% improvement in performance and execution speeds on the new AWS infrastructure.

• Minimized Downtime: Successfully migrated critical SAP servers with minimal disruption, crucial given IPG's substantial annual revenue.

• Enhanced Scalability: Implemented a scalable architecture design that caters to IPG's evolving business requirements.

• Leveraged AWS Native Services: Enabled IPG to utilize AWS native services, driving further digital transformation initiatives.