Brooks Brothers' Solution Hosted By AWS

Brooks Brothers frequently launches new business initiatives, which helps the company stay competitive in the retail industry. The organization needed a more agile way of quickly testing these new projects. “When we embark on a new initiative, as with anything in the retail industry, it has a short timeframe from the initial idea to solving business needs, as driven by consumer preferences,” says Philip Miller, director of infrastructure and technical engineering at Brooks Brothers. “We’re very good at deploying technology that will exist for the long term in our data center, but we’ve struggled to spin up resources for testing new projects. We wanted to become more agile in moving concepts into an environment we could easily access and possibly move into production.”

The organization was also seeking a more cost-effective way to manage its SAP HANA in-memory database management system, which would support a new customer relationship management (CRM) application. “We wanted to save money when we implemented the CRM system on SAP HANA, and we also wanted to be able to test out new projects on that platform,” says Miller. 

To realize agility and cost savings, Brooks Brothers decided to move its SAP HANA platform to the cloud. After considering solutions from leading cloud providers, the organization decided Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered the best solution. “AWS perfectly met our needs for agility and scale, and they have the best reputation in the marketplace,” says Laher. “Also, we knew AWS would be able to provide us with solutions beyond SAP.”



Brooks Brothers started its cloud journey by moving its SAP HANA systems to AWS, using the AWS SAP HANA Quick Start Reference Deployment guide. With the Quick Start guide, Brooks Brothers was able to easily deploy and build out its SAP HANA cluster using AWS CloudFormation scripts. “Without the CloudFormation templates, we would have had to install a Linux box, configure it, and then install the HANA application on top of that,” says Miller. “Using AWS SAP HANA Quick Start, we only needed to push a few buttons to get a functioning SAP HANA solution.”

• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
  Brooks Brothers now has the agility it requires to test and launch new projects in a short time frame. “With our SAP and SAP HANA systems on AWS, we can spin up instances in a matter of hours, which wasn’t an option in our previous world,” says Laher. “It would previously take weeks to set up a test environment on SAP HANA, including getting approvals to do the project and ordering and setting up the appliance.”
• [Product Improvement - Scalability]
  The organization can now scale its applications globally whenever necessary. “The geographic network capacity in AWS is very important to us,” Miller says. “For example, with AWS Direct Connect, interregional communications will traverse the AWS backbone, which is always going to be bigger and more widely distributed than what we could ever offer.” And expanding SAP applications to more users will also be simple. “At the drop of a hat, we can scale to the point where we can get more capacity without any downtime,” says Laher. “Using AWS, we can work toward a single-instance global model where we can install once and deploy anywhere.”
• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  As it moves additional business-critical SAP applications to AWS, Brooks Brothers expects to continue to save time and money and be able to direct more energy toward its goals. “Using AWS helps us concentrate more on our priorities,” says Laher. “Instead of putting our resources into maintaining our infrastructure, we can focus solely on initiatives that can elevate our business and add more value to our customers.”