​​New standalone company Haleon minimizes cloud migration disruptions, halves SAP hosting costs running on Azure​

The start of an 18-month program of full digital transformation

British multinational company Haleon, formerly the consumer healthcare division within GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), spun off in the middle of 2022, becoming a standalone business encompassing leading brands like Advil, Sensodyne, and Voltaren. The monumental split accelerated Haleon’s goals around digital transformation and business resiliency while presenting a mix of new challenges and opportunities. It also kickstarted the company’s search for a trusted platform to simultaneously support a datacenter exit and business divestiture.

Haleon inherited many of its previous parent company’s SAP-based platforms, but one core element of the company’s infrastructure is entirely its own: being hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. “The separation gave us a great opportunity to reimagine our technology landscape, and we made a strategic decision to move to the cloud with Azure because we couldn’t remain on GSK’s datacenters,” recalls Gaurav Shridhar, Head of ERP Service Assurance and Operations at Haleon. Adds Usman Hamid, Vice President of Design and Engineering at Haleon, “Given our preexisting relationship with Microsoft, its close ties with SAP, and how we would deploy SAP to cloud environments while also taking advantage of Microsoft 365 enterprise licensing, choosing Azure for the majority of our hosting requirements going forward made a lot of sense.”

Haleon’s decision to migrate to Azure sparked an 18-month program of copying and cloning the SAP systems that were critical to operating as a standalone entity, including those related to finance, payroll, and digital workplace technologies carried over from GSK. Thanks to the simplicity of moving to Azure, the transition required no major system or application refactoring. This supported Haleon’s ambitious year-and-a-half migration, which was successfully delivered in time to ring the bell at the London and New York Stock Exchanges in July 2022—a huge win for the newly formed Digital and Technology function.

Tapping into Azure and the Microsoft ecosystem to unlock full potential

As Haleon started moving to Azure, it evaluated several maturity vectors to help ensure its success. The company runs its ERP systems on SAP applications with Oracle on Azure. Given how critical SAP is for the company, SAP optimization and resiliency were at the top of its teams’ agendas. At the same time, the speed required for the corporate spinoff meant that IT staff couldn’t build a datacenter facility from scratch to meet all of the company’s IT needs. This gave Haleon extra motivation to explore the Azure ecosystem. “Our IT services effectively bring in revenue for the business, so the products we use should be completely invisible but stable, and thankfully Azure provides that,” explains Hamid.

The company’s current Azure Stack includes Azure Virtual Machines along with on-demand infrastructure models and platform environments within its SQL Server and Oracle database space. It uses Linux on Azure and Windows operating systems on the software engineering side, alongside Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure DevOps, and GitHub on Azure to simplify complex workloads and code. “We decided day one to automate the provisioning and patching of our SAP environment, and we have now coded that to deploy fairly quickly,” says Hamid. Haleon also uses Azure to scale up and scale out compute and memory needs for large enterprise applications like its ERP systems, which helps it quickly meet business demands. He adds, “When we need to deploy new database servers, we can do that within minutes now on Azure as opposed to taking weeks.”

Extending that approach, Haleon sought to take advantage of Microsoft as a single, familiar vendor for multiple services to support the initial carve-out and create positive employee experiences along with a better digital workplace. “The whole Microsoft ecosystem became the glue for our company as we went through our migration,” says Hamid. “And not just for tracking things like where we are on architecture approval using Microsoft Planner, SharePoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams but to create a golden thread throughout the platform.” He also notes that Azure helped Haleon accelerate and hit its separation date while also enabling the company to be productive immediately. “We had this untapped potential that we were learning to use at the same time as our migration, which meant that we could think about things like resiliency and using more modern technologies from the outset.”

Prioritizing scalability and flexibility for the short and long-term

An important consideration in the company’s long-term success was overall scalability and flexibility. Fortunately, Azure presented the perfect foundation for an extendable environment. Haleon’s IT staff didn’t have to worry about putting all their energy into a comprehensive IT stack but could instead expand, fine-tune, and optimize it over time while also having the option to scale back what isn’t needed later. “Hosting on Azure allowed us to quickly scale up and scale out rather than deal with traditional sourcing and hardware sizing challenges,” says Shridhar. “We could better help top and bottom-line programs related to growth because of the agility and flexibility of Azure.”

Most impressively, Haleon’s approach to copying and cloning SAP positioned it to run at GSK’s scale despite being a newly independent company, and Azure met the challenge of supporting such a remarkably fast-growing business. “Some of the virtual machines that we run really demonstrate the power of Azure for our big production and manufacturing ERP environments and things like SAP that keep our business running like it is,” says Shridhar.

Overcoming uncertainty and trusting a support ecosystem

A year and a half into its Azure journey, Haleon credits the immediate speed of execution in Azure for helping it build out an initial landing zone and core platform that led to a move-in-ready environment. “Migrating to Azure also gave us an environment where we could test the migration model with our partners and then understand the capabilities that we would require of partners after the migration,” says Hamid.

In fact, Haleon credits its entire support network, including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM, Accenture, other tech companies, consultancy groups, and its managed service partners, for coming together seamlessly and efficiently. “Given that a lot of us were new to the company, we were scaling at high speed, and we were building out technology capabilities in some regions where the talent pool is very competitive, being able to do this successfully was a great achievement,” adds Hamid. “We did this against a backdrop of ambiguity and uncertainty, but we were able to use our partners and their scale to get the job done.”

Now well along on its cloud journey, Haleon still takes comfort in knowing that Azure remains flexible to change. “Even early on when our company didn’t have a name, and we were using other intermediary elements, we were confident that with Azure, we wouldn’t have to start over from the beginning,” says Hamid. “We had no disruptions during the two years we moved from GSK to Haleon—for example, I didn’t lose a single email during that time. We used Microsoft products like Teams throughout and were able to get the job done.”

Quantifying progress, with more to come

As it runs on and optimizes its Azure environment over time, Haleon continues to turn lessons learned into new efficiencies, including significantly cutting hosting costs with SAP on Azure. “We’ve halved our SAP hosting cost since we started our Azure journey, and through deployments of high-availability architectures, we’ve reduced ERP unavailability to our business by 95 percent,” says Shridhar.

And this is just the beginning. “We’re building a critical mass of capability both in-house and with our partners in terms of getting the best out of our platforms,” adds Hamid. “We’re continuing to work with Microsoft on emerging trends and how we can take advantage of its products in our daily operations.”

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