SAP Commerce Cloud processes $17.8 billion in merchandise during peak shopping day with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

SAP, a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, is redefining what reliability means in e-commerce by delivering 99.99% uptime for customers, even during peak shopping moments. SAP’s previous approach to storage and computing strained under sudden traffic surges. The company rebuilt the foundation in partnership with Microsoft, migrating 6,000 databases to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, unlocking instant scalability and up to 128 TB of storage. On Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days in the United States, SAP supported its customers by processing $17.8 billion in gross merchandise value with no downtime. SAP is now turning that same ambition toward embracing agentic AI, giving customers powerful new ways to automate business processes, optimize operations, and move faster than ever before.

Serving e-commerce customers with a unified software solution

It takes one viral moment to break a brand site with an unexpected traffic spike. Even a few minutes of downtime at the wrong moment could mean millions of dollars in lost revenue. SAP has spent 50 years evolving from a startup to a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI. SAP Commerce Cloud, which was introduced in 2018, reflects that drive to stay ahead of the industry curve.

“Commerce Cloud is a solution that unifies commerce for our customers,” says Conner Helton, Senior Manager of Product Management for Commerce Cloud at SAP. “We have services to link point-of-sale transactions to a customer’s enterprise resource planning system and services at the front end where you buy products from some of the world’s largest and well-known e-commerce companies. We host, maintain, and operate those systems on behalf of our customers.”

SAP had previously relied on a fixed bundled approach to secure the compute, memory, and input/output resources needed to support Commerce Cloud. This approach worked until SAP’s rapid growth hit a ceiling. Its customers required instant scalability and flexible storage capabilities to handle high traffic volumes from marketing campaigns, new product initiatives, and unexpected viral moments.

“Imagine that you’re a cosmetic company and an influencer goes on TikTok and talks about your product,” says Helton. “That triggers an instant surge of traffic to your shop, as people who follow that influencer are now interested in buying your product. We did not have the capability to scale those databases very, very quickly before.”

In 2024, SAP recognized that it was time for its Commerce Cloud architecture to evolve, migrating its existing infrastructure to the cloud-native Azure SQL Database Hyperscale to give its customers compute and storage scaling on demand.

Migrating 6,000 production databases in just one year

SAP and Microsoft crafted an ambitious plan to migrate 6,000 databases into Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Every minute of downtime meant real revenue was at risk for SAP Commerce Cloud customers, so a seamless migration was SAP’s top priority. “Our customers are very sensitive toward any changes, so we went through extensive testing in the lab first and then in customer development and staging environments,” says Sherif Yousri, Vice President of Commerce Cloud Operations at SAP. “Our support from Microsoft throughout was stellar. We had the entire engineering team, the support team on the Microsoft side, the customer success teams—everybody was very supportive. I don’t think we could have done it on our own.”

With Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, the ceiling was eliminated, and brands no longer had the storage and compute limitations inherent to SAP’s earlier bundled approach. “On the compute side, we were limited at 32 virtual cores, but we had customers whose scaling needs went well above that,” says Helton. “With Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, we can go up to 192 virtual cores and store up to 128 TB of data.” The company also boosted resilience and customer uptime with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale’s zone redundancy feature to power a 99.995% service level agreement.

SAP Commerce Cloud's environments now run in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for greater scalability and resilience. Acting as the orchestration layer for Commerce Cloud's compute infrastructure, AKS manages the scaling process automatically, allowing the platform to respond to real demand events such as flash sales or shifting customer workload patterns without manual intervention.

Azure Blob Storage brings the same elasticity to the storage layer, growing automatically alongside each customer's evolving needs, and Azure Key Vault adds a dedicated layer of security.

“One of the things that SAP prides itself on is the security of our customers and their data,” says Helton. “Azure Key Vault secures token secrets and keys, and every customer has their own to keep everything very private and very secure.”

SAP and Microsoft planned and executed the migration within a year and with no disruptions to SAP Commerce Cloud customers. “The orchestration of that entire process was very complex,” says Enrique Espinosa, Global Head of Product Success and Customer Engagement, Commerce Cloud, at SAP. “With the support of Microsoft, underpinned by the technology, we were able to do it successfully.”

Processing $17.8 billion of gross merchandise on one of the busiest shopping days

This migration laid the foundation for SAP to offer SAP Commerce Cloud customers up to 99.99% uptime, the equivalent of just five minutes of downtime in an entire month. In an industry where every minute counts, SAP offers customers tools they can trust to capture every sales opportunity.

The timing for the initiative could not have been better. SAP completed the migration in time to support Black Friday in 2025. The results were astonishing. “$17.8 billion worth of gross merchandise went through the system with 100% uptime,” says Helton. “The peak number of orders was 648,000 orders per hour, which is almost 11,000 orders per minute.”

With its new architecture in place, SAP is confident that it can seamlessly support the ebb and flow of e-commerce, shifting its narrative from a focus on limitations to one of possibilities. “It gives us a lot of flexibility to give the customer options,” says Espinosa. “In the past, we had technical limitations, but now we can tell customers, ‘Here are the different options, this is how it will work, and we just need to partner together to make it happen.’”

Envisioning autonomous business processes for the future of e-commerce

SAP’s next big ambition is AI for agentic commerce. As new AI-ready capabilities become available in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, SAP is beginning to automate more business processes behind SAP Commerce Cloud. “We’re looking forward to introducing a lot of agentic AI into the commerce flow and across our entire customer experience suite,” says Helton. “Instead of human beings needing to plan events, update product descriptions, or respond to emails, we’ll see a future where that will be autonomous.”

That future is being built on more than just technology. The migration to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale deepened the partnership between SAP and Microsoft, laying the groundwork for the next wave of AI-forward innovation. “Technology is important, but partnerships are even more critical. We see this all the time with Microsoft,” says Espinosa. “Technology will only get you to a certain point—it’s the actual partnerships that you have with the teams that make all the difference.”

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