Case Study: UK Power Networks achieves low-downtime SAP cloud migration with SAP and TCS

SAP Application Large Database migration by Oracle XTTS method to reduce downtime

UK Power Networks, a major UK electricity distribution operator serving 19 million customers, needed to exit its data centre by December 2024 while keeping downtime to weekends and avoiding disruption to mission-critical SAP workloads. Its large SAP databases, including SAP ECC, SAP CRM and SAP BW, were creating performance bottlenecks, and some systems were running on end-of-life platforms. SAP was involved through SAP migration tools and services used in the program.

SAP and partner TCS implemented an Azure migration using Oracle XTTS for the large SAP databases, with full backups taken ahead of cutover and frequent incremental backups to reduce downtime. The result was a successful migration of 123 applications, including all 16 SAP applications, to cloud with no major business disruption; SAP ECC, SAP CRM and SAP BW downtime stayed below 48 hours, the plan was delivered on time and on budget, and technical debt was reduced by about 60% while system uptime improved to 99.9%.

UK Power Networks

Matt Webb

Head of Enterprise Data Management