Cintas Corporation and Lemongrass complete major SAP migration

Lemongrass has completed a year-long project in which it assisted Cintas Corporation, an American service company with over 40,000 employees and a global customer base of more than one million businesses, in the migration of its SAP estate to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Seeking a digital transformation targeting higher growth, Cintas chose to update their business and technology methodologies, which meant a migration of their entire SAP estate, consisting of 200+ servers as well as a large uncompressed 130+ TB ECC database on Oracle, to Google Cloud. As Google and Cintas had a successful strategic relationship, Cintas chose to remain with Google to take advantage of Google’s microservices, cloud-native automation and Cloud native architecture management to drive agility in combination with Google Cloud Cortex Framework for increased innovation. The engagement also included collaborating on a RISE with SAP use case for one of the Cintas Corporation’s business units with SAP S/4HANA.

To minimise their risk, Cintas requested a lift-and-shift migration and directed Google to recommend their most experienced migration solution provider to assist with the project. GCP specifically recommended Lemongrass because of its experience in migrating large complex SAP landscapes with minimal business disruption.

After a short Advisory engagement, Lemongrass identified a more strategic heterogeneous migration and moved Cintas from a legacy Power Platform leveraging Oracle to Native GCP and DB2.

This new plan was able to better deliver on the business outcomes expected by Cintas including significantly reducing costs, notably improving performance (over 50% reduction in database size) and maximising the transformative benefits resulting from running their complex SAP systems in a Cloud environment. An intrinsic part of the solution included leveraging patent-pending capabilities within the Lemongrass Cloud Platform (LCP) and strong expertise in services including Operational Managed Services, RISE with SAP, and Google Cloud Cortex Framework.

LCP is a governance, management and automation orchestration solution that optimises the operations of SAP and its related workloads on hyperscale Clouds. There are now over 750,000 users on SAP systems across leading global Cloud platforms managed by LCP. This platform underpins two of Lemongrass’s premium service offerings including the recently announced patent pending LCP Migrate and MDO™ (Minimum Downtime Operations) services announced in May of this year.

To handle the migration for Cintas, Lemongrass used LCP Migrate, a service offering built from years of Lemongrass innovations to enhance and optimise SAP standard migration processes to perform both homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations of very large databases to the Cloud with a guaranteed nearly zero technical downtime window.

Lemongrass executed a flawless migration of the Cintas SAP estate to Google Cloud with minimal downtime. In particular, a 130+ TB ECC Oracle DB became 41 TB on DB2 compressed, enabling Cintas to go fully Cloud native, thereby significantly lowering overhead costs, and providing a more stable, safer and faster data management platform. As a result, Cintas is now poised to reap the full benefits of Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure and innovative solutions.

“This is a notable achievement for Cintas in our Cloud journey,” said Matt Hough, Chief Information Officer at Cintas Corporation. “Due to this migration, Cintas will be able to significantly accelerate our AI and analytics journey with SAP on Google Cloud Platform. Google’s recommendation to bring on Lemongrass to manage the migration was perfect, and we’re excited to now be able to utilise Google’s industry-leading platforms such as the Google Cloud Cortex Framework.

“We are happy to announce our successful ‘go-live’ with Cintas Corporation,” said Michael Rosenbloom, CEO of Lemongrass. “Their achievement marks another milestone in our tenure as a proud Google Cloud partner, and our latest demonstration of Lemongrass’s unique ability to manage large-scale SAP to hyperscale Cloud migrations with LCP Migrate, as well as our RISE with SAP and Google Cloud Cortex Framework expertise. Thanks to Google for their recommendations and to Cintas for placing their trust in us. We look forward to our continued relationship with both teams in the future.”