Village Roadshow Entertainment Group operates an extensive chain of Village Cinemas and owns the film distributor Roadshow Distribution. It also owns and operates popular theme parks on Queensland’s Gold Coast, including Warner Bros. Movie World, Sea World, Wet’n’Wild Gold Coast, Australian Outback Spectacular, and Paradise Country, as well as Sea World Resort & Water Park. Additionally, Village Roadshow runs Village Roadshow Studios and Australia’s first Topgolf site in Gold Coast. Beyond entertainment, Village Roadshow is committed to environmental preservation and wildlife programs and contributes to the Australian film industry by producing and distributing local films.
Emerging from Covid, Village Roadshow found itself at a pivotal moment, with some businesses experiencing significant growth while others were stabilizing. This led to a comprehensive strategic review of their critical enterprise applications – SAP ecosystem as a backbone of their value chain. The objective was to drive innovation, optimize cost & operational efficiency and mitigate risk through consolidation of their SAP ecosystem to AWS Cloud and invest in capability uplift of staff.
Challenge
Village Roadshow’s applications were hosted on different solutions, including in the Cloud, and in multiple data centers. The company decided to consolidate its applications on AWS, with SAP and its ecosystem being the first key workloads to be migrated. The migration program would modernize the underlying Cloud technology stack, enhance system performance, and optimize operational costs across all of Village Roadshow’s IT landscape.
Due to their strong relationship with AWS, Village Roadshow followed their recommendation to consider Lemongrass as a partner on the migration project. Lemongrass was selected due to its proven expertise in SAP to Hyperscale Cloud migrations, its Premier AWS Consulting Partner status and its unique suite of SAP on Cloud automation tools.
“I would like to extend gratitude for the support and collaboration received from Lemongrass, who played a pivotal role in the successful completion of this migration. Together, we have not only accomplished the objective of modernizing our tech stack and optimizing operational costs, but have also set new standards for excellence in project execution. I am excited about this migration’s positive impact on Village Roadshow’s future growth and operational efficiency.”
Solution
The solution had two distinct phases: The Assessment Phase and the Migration Phase.
The Assessment Phase
The first step in this phase was to complete an AWS-funded “SAP on AWS Readiness Assessment”. This allowed the Village Roadshow and Lemongrass teams to design the best migration solution and create a technical blueprint to meet Village Roadshow’s technical, economic, and operational goals.
They also created a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to prove the financial viability of migrating and operating Village Roadshow’s SAP systems on AWS. This enabled them to establish a budget for the consolidation of their dispersed hosting solutions onto the AWS platform and even lay the foundation for the migration of future workloads.
Multiple options for the SAP on AWS target architecture were reviewed with the goal of defining the most secure, cost-effective, and low-risk migration path– including an extended hypercare period after the migration during which the applications would be stabilized and optimized.
Also, during this phase, the Village Roadshow and Lemongrass teams were able to develop a deeper understanding of how to best operate their applications on AWS, determine a blueprint for the consolidation of workloads in the future and modernize the target architecture to allow for continuous innovation.
The Migration Phase
The team established a common technical foundation (Landing Zone) on AWS to support the migrated SAP and non-SAP applications. The consolidated workloads allowed Village Roadshow to run a more “Cloudy” SAP landscape and take advantage of AWS’s Cloud native capabilities. Due to Village Roadshow’s strong relationship with AWS, and Lemongrass’s Premier AWS consulting partner status, AWS was able to provide significant funding for this program.
The migration project included upgrades to the operating system, database, and file system, resulting in a more modern and high-performing SAP landscape. A “Lift & Shift” approach was used to migrate key SAP applications and environments to AWS including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP); Customer Relationship Management (CRM); Fiori; Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC); Business Information Warehouse (BW); Business Objects (BO), Data Services (DS), Web Dispatcher, and Cloud Connector (CC). Lemongrass stabilized and optimized the migrated systems during an extended period of hypercare following the successful go-live of the project.
Results
The migration was accomplished on time and on budget, and achieved the key technical, economic, and operational goals initially set by Village Roadshow management. Both Village Roadshow and Lemongrass project delivery teams established a highly positive and collaborative culture, which substantially contributed to the success of the project.
Village Roadshow harnessed significant business value from the SAP on AWS migration, through a faster and more resilient system, ensuring high availability for critical business operations. The project also achieved annual ongoing cost savings of nearly $300K through modern design and resource optimization.
