Case Study: Macmillan India achieves near-100% SAP availability and ~30% operating-cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Macmillan India - Customer Case Study

Macmillan India, a 120‑year‑old educational publisher based in Gurgaon with more than 500 employees, needed to modernize its SAP-based order and distribution systems after a 2011 reorganization. Its on‑premises Chennai data center suffered aging servers, capacity‑constrained storage and networking, frequent VPN and leased‑line outages, and unreliable power—keeping SAP availability around 90% when the business required 99%+ to ensure textbooks reached students on time.

Working with PwC, Macmillan migrated SAP, a Drupal learning system, and CRM to AWS in about six months, running Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 with EBS provisioned IOPS, daily EBS snapshots to S3, multi‑AZ recovery, and a secured VPC with site‑to‑site VPN. The move eliminated almost all capital expenditure, cut operating costs by ~30%, reduced environment provisioning from six weeks to 30 minutes, improved SAP availability to nearly 100%, enabled four‑hour recovery objectives, and delivered more reliable remote access and stronger data protection.

Macmillan India

Rajesh Pasari

Finance & Operations Director