Case Study: GulfMark Offshore achieves 50% SAP hosting cost reduction and scalable, elastic operations with Amazon Web Services

GulfMark Offshore - Customer Case Study

GulfMark Offshore is a Houston‑based global energy services company that operates a fleet of more than 70 offshore support vessels, with $1.2 billion in assets and about 1,000 employees. Facing an energy‑market downturn, the company needed to reduce the high cost of SAP hosting (aiming for a 50% cut), gain greater scalability and elasticity for development and intermittently used apps, ensure 24/7 availability for critical systems, and consolidate regional IT infrastructure.

GulfMark piloted cloud deployments for accounts payable and vessel‑camera monitoring and then migrated its entire SAP environment to AWS (30 EC2 instances with EBS and EBS snapshots stored in S3), with plans to shift backups and regional IT to the cloud. The move cut SAP hosting costs by 50%—about $25,000 per month—while enabling global scaling of applications (global deck‑camera monitoring and multi‑region AP), improved visibility and on‑demand elasticity, higher availability, and freed IT resources to focus on business‑facing initiatives.

GulfMark Offshore

Lee Johnson

Senior Vice President & CIO