The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation is looking to migrate to SAP "sovereign cloud" as part of a wider enterprise resource planning upgrade.
The federal agency is intending to upgrade its decade-old SAP ECC6 on-premises platform to S/4 HANA, which will run on SAP’s “sovereign cloud”.
The sovereign cloud, which launched in Australia last July, runs in hardened facilities that the vendor has set up for the Australia and New Zealand market.
ANSTO intends to migrate its on-premises environment to the cloud, alongside SAP integrated business planning (IBP) and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) for HANA, before the end of support for ECC in December 2027.
The agency currently has 13 SAP modules it plans to move to the vendor’s sovereign cloud. It also runs Concur, SuccessFactors and IBP on public cloud, as well as several non-SAP applications that are integrated with ECC.
According to request for information documents [pdf], the ANSTO environment spans five research facilities across two sites: Lucas Heights in Sydney's south, and Clayton in Victoria. At these sites, the agency has 1300 permanent employees and around 1000 contractors.
ANSTO has operated in an SAP environment since 2002 and began upgrading to ECC6 in 2012.
However, in 2018, agency employees raised a number of concerns about data in the SAP system, ranging from privacy issues to problems with leave allocations and superannuation payments.
Two years ago, ANSTO announced the completion of a nine-month SAP IBP rollout, which it said delivered $1 million in savings in the first six months.
The rollout was specifically targeted at the manufacture and distribution of the 1215 radiopharmaceutical products it produces
