Woolworths Inks Cloud Partnership With Microsoft

Woolworths has announced a partnership with Microsoft to migrate its current SAP cloud footprint to Azure.

Under the deal, Woolworths will migrate its SAP applications and platforms, including SAP ERP and SAP Cloud platform, to Azure and make way for the retailer's eventual plans to move to SAP S/4HANA.

"Our cloud transformation is making work simpler for our teams, streamlining our supply chains, and improve the customer experiences across our vast network of stores and online channels," Woolworths CIO John Hunt said.

"Azure is a trusted, resilient, and high performing cloud platform, supporting our ongoing digital transformation and we are confident it will provide us with the performance and flexibility required to meet our ever-evolving SAP requirements in providing exceptional customer experience." 

This, however, would not be the first time that Woolworths has leveraged Azure. It's also the cloud platform used to support the grocery giant's online store. 

"As demand for our e-commerce services has soared in the wake of the global health crisis, we've had to scale our online capability incredibly fast. Traffic to our website has doubled and our app use is up more than 320%," Woolworths chief digital technology officer Nick Eshkenazi recently said in a blog post.

"With Azure Kubernetes Service we have been able to remove some of the manual steps previously required in our releases -- speeding the process up and increasing the reliability of our delivery.

Woolworths is the first company in the Asia Pacific Japan region to take advantage of the Embrace initiative, which was announced last year.

Embrace is a collaboration between Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and global strategic service partners, that was designed to help businesses move SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.

Woolworths turned to SAP back in 2016 to help fix its technology basics, including overhauling outdated systems and its entire human resources function.

The retailer's future plans to upgrade to S/4HANA follows in the footsteps of its rival Coles, which announced last year it would be implementing the platform to automate its procurement, HR, and business processes.

At the time, Coles' chief information and digital officer Roger Sniezek touted the move would allow it to be as efficient as possible across the retail environment for both customers and team members.

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