Cloud Powered Modernization Journey of Tecan Towards Agility and Growth

Introduction

In today’s fast-changing business environment, agility and resilience are not just nice-to-have qualities, they are essential for long-term success. Companies across industries are under pressure to innovate faster, manage costs effectively, and respond rapidly to evolving customer expectations. Tecan, a leading global provider of laboratory instruments and solutions, recognized that its legacy IT infrastructure was becoming a roadblock to these ambitions. Aging systems limited scalability, slowed innovation cycles, and made responding quickly to changing demands harder.

To overcome these challenges, Tecan embarked on a bold cloud transformation journey. What began as a strategic migration of its SAP workloads soon evolved into a broader enterprise-wide modernization. By embracing cloud-native technologies, advanced analytics, and next-generation collaboration tools, Tecan reshaped its operations, improved resilience, and unlocked new opportunities for innovation.

Phase 1: Migrating SAP to the Cloud

For many enterprises, SAP systems are the backbone of operations, supporting critical functions like finance, supply chain, procurement, and manufacturing. At Tecan, these systems were indispensable but resource-intensive, costly to maintain on-premises, and difficult to scale efficiently.

By migrating SAP to the cloud, Tecan was able to:

• Enhance performance and reliability by running SAP on a cloud infrastructure designed for mission-critical workloads.
• Reduce costs by eliminating on-premises hardware maintenance and optimizing compute resources.
• Increase agility with flexible scaling, allowing IT to adapt quickly to business growth or seasonal demand.

The SAP migration was more than just a technical upgrade, it provided the confidence and foundation Tecan needed to expand its cloud-first strategy across the enterprise.

Phase 2: Expanding to Enterprise-Wide Transformation

With SAP stabilized in the cloud, Tecan quickly recognized that the benefits of cloud adoption extended far beyond improved performance and cost savings. The company began modernizing other areas of its IT landscape, accelerating a shift from isolated projects to an enterprise-wide transformation.

Key steps included:

• Modernizing Applications: Re-architecting legacy applications into cloud-native services to improve scalability and speed of innovation.
• Data-Driven Insights: Cloud-based analytics platforms unify data across the organization, empowering better decision-making.
• Collaboration & Productivity: Deploying cloud-based collaboration tools that enabled secure, remote, and hybrid work models across global teams.
• Innovation Acceleration: Leveraging AI/ML services to automate processes and drive product development and customer service innovation.

This shift marked a cultural as well as a technical change. Tecan’s cloud adoption catalyzes collaboration, innovation, and operational agility across the organization.

Benefits of Tecan’s Cloud Transformation

The enterprise-wide approach to cloud adoption delivered benefits at multiple levels:

• Resilience and Reliability
  Cloud-based infrastructure provided redundancy and high availability, ensuring mission-critical systems like SAP remained resilient.
• Scalability and Agility
  Tecan can now scale IT resources on demand, supporting innovation while staying cost-efficient.
• Operational Efficiency
  Automated management, monitoring, and security tools reduce manual overhead, freeing teams to focus on strategic projects.
• Faster Innovation
  Cloud-native services and AI-driven automation accelerate product development cycles and enhance customer experiences.
• Global Collaboration
  Employees across geographies now collaborate seamlessly through cloud-enabled platforms, driving productivity and innovation.

Technical Implementation

Tecan’s transformation was executed in carefully planned phases to minimize disruption and maximize business value:

• SAP Migration: Migrating SAP workloads to a secure, compliant cloud environment with minimal disruption.
• Hybrid Model to Full Cloud: Initially adopting a hybrid cloud for risk mitigation, progressively moving towards enterprise-wide cloud adoption.
• Cloud-Native Services: Refactoring applications using microservices, containers, and serverless computing.
• Data & Analytics: Deploying advanced analytics tools and machine learning services to create actionable insights from operational data.
• Security & Compliance: Leveraging AWS IAM, encryption, and compliance monitoring to meet industry regulations and customer trust requirements.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

• Change Management: Transitioning from legacy systems required cultural adaptation, training, and a mindset shift towards cloud-first thinking.
• Integration Complexity: Migrating SAP and connecting it to modern applications required careful planning and phased execution.
• Governance: Establishing robust governance frameworks was critical to control costs, ensure security, and manage multi-cloud environments.
• Skill Gaps: Upskilling IT teams in cloud technologies was necessary to leverage the new environment fully.

Conclusion

Tecan’s cloud journey demonstrates how a focused SAP migration can become the springboard for enterprise-wide transformation. By embracing cloud-native architectures, modern collaboration tools, and data-driven innovation, Tecan built an IT foundation that is resilient, agile, and future-ready.

Today, the company runs its SAP workloads more efficiently and empowers employees, accelerates innovation, and delivers greater value to customers worldwide. Tecan’s experience highlights a critical truth: cloud adoption is not simply a technical migration but a strategic enabler of enterprise-wide change.

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