Direct Wines selects smartShift to modernize and move their SAP landscape to AWS

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Mar 08, 2022, 09:00 ET

BOSTON, March 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- smartShift Technologies, the world's leading provider of Intelligent Automation for SAP transformations, today announced that Direct Wines, an international wine merchant headquartered in Reading, Berkshire, has selected smartShift as its preferred provider for modernizing and migrating their SAP environments to the Amazon Web Services cloud. Upgrading their business-critical SAP system and moving it to AWS will give the Direct Wines team a more robust platform for ongoing operations, re-enable IT's ability to develop enhancements for faster innovation, and ultimately provide a better experience for their customers.

"Our engagement with Direct Wines started with an outcome-driven, risk-free phase-zero approach for the customer," said Matt Aucella, Chief Sales Officer, smartShift. "We developed a migration methodology powered by our Intelligent Automation™ to address all key components of the SAP upgrade and move to the cloud. Additionally, we ticked off all the success criteria defined by Direct Wines for the Phase Zero and are now excited to implement the full project."

"Our version of SAP required upgrading the application by several releases, in addition to a heterogeneous migration. All of this needed to be achieved with a small SAP practice that was busy with business initiatives. We searched for a partner that could support this migration and had experience with Public Cloud. For a small practice we needed as much automation as possible to reduce development demands. smartShift impressed both in terms of their SAP Automation and knowledge, but importantly the culture and professionalism of the team," said Leighton Francis, Head of Architecture, Direct Wines.

"What stands out about smartShift is their flexibility. Our older SAP landscape required modernizing and migrating to the cloud while still being able to support connected systems some of which had legacy constraints. smartShift gave us a well-balanced solution that ensures future support while we work on our long-term roadmap. This is a complex project and we needed to validate the approach. smartShift shared the financial risk with a 'Phase Zero' implementation, initially investing their own effort upfront before subsequently following up with sensible payment milestones. We're confident that this implementation will be an important evolutionary step for our business," said David Ives, CIO, Direct Wines.

"Working with SmartShift to migrate the SAP workload to AWS cloud will give Direct Wines much greater agility than before. Direct Wines can make changes much faster and respond quicker to requests from the business and give strategic choices going forward," said Jonathan Lake, SAP Business Manager, AWS

About smartShift
smartShift is the world's leading provider of Intelligent Automation for SAP transformations. smartShift Intelligent Automation^TM is trusted by global brands to drive innovation. We help customers accelerate the transformation of their SAP systems to next-generation cloud computing environments. Our solutions have delivered thousands of application modernization initiatives, analyzing and converting over 2.5 billion lines of code, eliminating risk, and freeing up strategic resources to focus on growth.

About Direct Wines

Direct Wines Limited is a family-owned wine merchant founded in 1969 when a young Tony Laithwaite drove a van of claret from Bordeaux back to the UK to sell to family and friends (a man and a van, with help from his grandmother).

Fast forward 53 years and Direct Wines, trading as Laithwaites, is the UK's No.1 online wine retailer with over half a million regular customers yet still goes direct to the growers in their vineyards to guarantee wines of character and authenticity. The retailer also runs wine clubs for the likes of The Sunday Times, BBC Good Food and British Airways.

Internationally, Direct Wines owns and operates a number of vineyards and wineries -- including in Bordeaux and Australia's Barossa Valley -- as well as selling direct to customers in the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

www.laithwaites.co.uk

About Amazon Web Services

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics etc. https://aws.amazon.com/

Contact:
Kirsten Paragona
[email protected]
Phone: 978-257-7955

SOURCE smartShift