Hillarys draws the curtain on Oracle and HP as it plans shift to SAP HANA and SUSE Linux

Out with Oracle and HP-UX as Hillarys opts to run its business on SAP HANA and Huawei appliances

Hillarys, the British windows-covering retailer, is planning to migrate database vendor from Oracle to SAP Hana in a shift that will coincide with an upgrade to SAP's Business Suite 4 Hana (S4/Hana). At the same time, the company will also move its underlying hardware infrastructure from HP servers running HP-UX Unix to Huawei appliances running SUSE Linux 12 and vSphere 6.

The migration will be completed over Christmas and will be supported by Birchman, Hillarys' SAP reseller, implementation and support services partner.

However, while the company is looking forward to some of the efficiency benefits of running its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on an in-memory database, Hillarys head of ICT, Julian Bond, described the move in terms of the company's decision to stick with SAP, the consequent need to upgrade from Business Suite v5 before support was discontinued, and the need to minimise disruption to the business.

"If you asked me whether I have cost-justified this move on the back of massive savings we're going to make, I'd say that part of it is that we're running the SAP Business Suite and we last upgraded in 2006, so are heading out of support," Bond told Computing. "We had to ask, 'are we going to stay with SAP?'"

The company took a hard-headed business decision to stick with SAP, despite its cost, because it didn't have an appetite to migrate the ERP platform lock, stock and barrel to an alternative, whether on-premise or software-as-a-service. Bond added that the decision to shift to SAP Hana at the same time was made in order to avoid being forced to make such a potentially disruptive move in two or three years' time, given SAP's keenness to push customers from Oracle to SAP Hana.

Indeed, Bond said that given the amount the company has been paying every year in maintenance charges, SAP could and should arguably have offered a no-cost shift from Oracle to Hana as the database platform, rather than expecting customers to pay again.

"In terms of its capabilities, they would talk about SAP Hana helping in our transformation into a fully digital business. I think that slightly over-eggs the part they have got to play in it. But nevertheless it will help us become more web-committed, and make it much more straightforward to integrate to mobile and web apps using their gateway services," said Bond.

In addition to migrating the company's data from Oracle to SAP Hana, Bond is also planning to de-clutter the company's SAP Business Suite implementation, using the opportunity to streamline business processes harnessing SAP's Simple Finance and Simple Logistics initiatives.

To support the shift, Hillarys is buying six Huawei SAP hardware appliances: a combination of RH5885H V3 and RH8100 models, both running fast PCIe solid state disks. One of the devices will run the SAP Business Suite and the other will run SAP Hana.

John Morrison, vice president of Huawei UK Enterprise Business, described the contract as Huawei's biggest IT hardware "win" in Western Europe to date for a SAP Hana project. "We have similar, well-established deployments elsewhere in the world, using SAP Hana's software technology to combine database, application processing, and integration services on a single platform," he said.

Hillarys adopted SAP NetWeaver in the early 2000s, a decision made before Bond joined the company, and one that the company's founder, Tony Hillary, claimed almost sunk the company. The company has nevertheless stuck with SAP, which has underpinned its growth in turnover from around £70m in 2002 to more than £150m, taking around 12,000 orders and making 35,000 blinds every week.

It predominantly manufactures its range of blinds, shutters and curtains in the UK.