Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), one of the largest steel manufacturers in India, is among the 10 Maharatna companies in the country classified as Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs).
Government-owned SAIL has embarked on a cloud transformation journey with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) leveraging the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to enable the seamless migration of its SAP environment and data management. The Indian steel agency advanced its digitalisation, specifically for its Central Marketing Organization (CMO), to modernise its infrastructure for SAP environment, reduce its environmental footprint, and prepare for future SAP S/4HANA migration.
Commenting on the SAIL-HPE collaborative alliance, Som Satsangi, Managing Director, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India, said:
“We are excited to build on the decades’ long partnership with SAIL as we offer them the HPE GreenLake platform to obtain the best on-premises cloud experience to address their current and future business challenges. Customers are increasingly turning to HPE GreenLake and our extensive system integrator capabilities to design and implement a modernized, end-to-end solution that can support their digital transformation and easily scale to meet future requirements. We look forward to further build on this and offer the same services to other public and private entities.”
Maximising Customer Data of Steel Authority of India Limited
SAIL’s CMO is one of the leading industrial marketing entities in India that focuses on building brands for the manufacturer’s steel plants’ products such as carbon, alloy, special steel products, and stainless steel. Having a vast network spanning 4 Regional Offices, 37 Branch Sales Offices, 43 operational Warehouses, and 9 operational Customer Contact Offices, SAIL had relied on its strong ERP system that ran on HPE technology to ensure seamless delivery of business-critical applications and processes across the organisation.
However, the organisation recognised the impending need to modernise its existing infrastructure to be capable of supporting the slated SAP S/4HANA migration and ensure application availability for business continuity. In addition, it was imperative for SAIL to achieve an enhanced cloud experience based on flexible consumption model with a capacity available on demand–hosted in its own data center– for the protection of their critical and constantly growing customer data.
In partnership with HPE Pointnext Services team, HPE’s customer-focused IT support services, SAIL implemented the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to back the company’s need for urgent digital transformation with minimal upfront investment. Moreover, with the solution’s capability to deliver an on-premises cloud with capacity available on demand, SAIL was able to achieve the following:
- A full edge-to-cloud infrastructure for the SAP environment and future SAP S/4HANA workloads
- Uninterrupted Unix to Linux migration with less application downtime
- A new architecture based on open standards with a complete storage refresh
- Reduced datacenter footprint
- Reduced power consumption and operational complexity
- Improved operating costs
- A dashboard for IT spending visibility
SAIL’s modernisation strategy in partnerhsip with HPE is similar to that of another Maharatna company Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited’s (ONGC) transformation last October 2021. ONGC selected the HPE GreenLake platform to host its SAP S/4 HANA workloads in ONGC data centers in a bid to speed up digitalalisation, improve compliance and security, enhance performance, reduce transaction processing, and unlock insights harnessing advanced analytics.