Tecan’s Cloud Journey: From SAP Migration to Enterprise-Wide Transformation

Enterprises operating on-premises IT face challenges including high ownership costs, significant operational effort, talent shortages, and limited scalability to support business growth. Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables businesses to easily scale their operations, supporting rapid business growth and market expansion.

In this blog post, you will learn how Tecan, a Swiss-based global leader in laboratory solutions, is transforming its IT landscape using AWS. Through tailored AWS programs, expert guidance, and a proven framework, Tecan is building the technical and organizational readiness needed for cloud migration and enterprise-wide transformation.

Introduction

Tecan Group Ltd., founded in Switzerland in 1980, currently employs over 3,000 people across production and research and development sites in North America, Europe, and Asia, with a sales and service network spanning 52 countries. As a pioneer in laboratory automation with global presence, Tecan’s business growth over the past several years has been driven by continuous innovation in its core product areas, strategic acquisitions, and expansion into new markets. During this growth, the company’s IT infrastructure has faced increasing demands. The growing complexity of managing on-premises systems—especially for critical applications like SAP—created bottlenecks, increased costs, and slowed innovation. Tecan recognized the need for a more agile, scalable, and secure IT foundation to support its global business. Their vision is to establish reliable and secure cloud-based infrastructure in the short-term, while accelerating digital transformation in the long run.

SAP Migration: A Critical Milestone

In 2024, Tecan began working with AWS to modernize its IT landscape, starting with its SAP systems. Managing SAP systems on-premises had required significant infrastructure maintenance, which limited the company’s ability to quickly adapt to business needs. By migrating its SAP workloads to AWS, Tecan aimed to reduce the burden of infrastructure management and gain the agility needed to support future growth and acquisitions.

Building a solid Cloud Foundation: The first step in Tecan’s AWS journey was building a robust AWS Landing Zone, providing a secure foundation for their cloud environment. This foundation provides Tecan with a well-architected AWS environment to get started with identity and access management, governance capabilities, data security, network connectivity, and logging, with which Tecan could start their SAP migration to AWS. Additionally, by having the AWS Enterprise On-Ramp support plan, Tecan gets access to a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) that proactively helps them optimize workloads and get the most out of AWS services.

Improved Efficiency and Performance: Tecan relies on SAP systems to manage core business operations, including control of the production cycle which encompasses planning, procurement, finance, sales and logistics. Their on-prem landscape includes multiple self-managed SAP systems and a higher number of instances, for which Tecan has the growing need for increased agility, cost-efficiency and scalability. Tecan’s IT team worked closely with AWS experts in a series of workshops to map out how their SAP workloads would fit into their AWS Landing Zone. These sessions helped Tecan develop a cloud migration strategy, establishing a clear roadmap with optimal AWS region selection, architecture, instance types, and implementation partners. In March 2025, within 6 months of the first workshop, Tecan successfully migrated all SAP systems to AWS. Since then, Tecan has experienced a measurable increase in SAP system reliability and performance: IT processes are now approximately 30% faster. Additionally, by modernizing on AWS, Tecan substantially reduced the data disaster synchronization time between SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems.

Reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): By leveraging AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), Tecan benefits from a proven migration methodology that includes funding and tools to reduce costs, automate and accelerate execution. Tecan followed best practices for cloud cost optimization, which includes right sizing of instances and purchasing of Savings Plans covering 100% of their compute needs. This led to a significant cost reduction compared to their previous on-prem SAP system. Over the year, these measures are projected to further lower their total cost of ownership, freeing up resources for innovation and growth.

Enterprise-Wide Transformation

Tecan’s cloud journey extends beyond SAP migration to encompass a complete data center migration to AWS and enterprise-wide digital transformation. AWS provides tailored guidance and support aligned with Tecan’s business objectives and current needs.

Tecan team at AWS Classroom Training at the AWS Zurich office

Cloud Readiness: Tecan participated in AWS workshops that brought together key stakeholders from across the company on AWS Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) and Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). These interactive workshops helped Tecan systematically evaluate their cloud readiness across six critical dimensions including Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security and Operations. A key outcome of these engagements was identifying skills gaps and developing cloud competencies across multiple teams.

Building Cloud Competency: Tecan has gained extensive experience with on-prem IT technology in the past decades. However, cloud operations is a fairly new topic to the team. Recognizing the importance of cloud skills, Tecan has invested in comprehensive AWS training for the whole organization and started building cloud functions by hiring and upskilling. This includes AWS Skill Builder Team subscriptions, topic driven workshops and a tailored upskilling plan driven by AWS Classroom Training. This focus on skill development ensures that Tecan’s team is well-equipped to innovate on AWS.

Modernization: The transformation includes the modernization of the current architecture and tooling. However, this doesn’t necessarily require an immediate overhaul of existing systems. Taking networking as example, rather than making a rapid shift to cloud-native services, Tecan took a measured approach to connect sites and AWS regions using their existing SD-WAN solution as mid-mile connectivity, maintaining the familiar routing and security controls for enhanced inter-region communication. Tecan views this as an interim step towards adopting cloud-native services such as AWS Cloud WAN. Additionally, Tecan has chosen AWS for RISE with SAP as the next step of modernization after the migration. This decision aims to further reduce costs, increase agility, and drive new innovation around core business systems. These examples showcase how organizations can successfully balance existing infrastructure with AWS cloud, creating a scalable foundation for ongoing cloud transformation.

Looking Ahead: Innovation and Growth

Tecan’s AWS journey exemplifies a strategic, phased approach to cloud adoption. By starting with a solid foundation and focusing on critical systems like SAP, Tecan has set the stage for a comprehensive enterprise-wide transformation. AWS will keep supporting Tecan to become a modern digital business with our expertise through AWS Enterprise that provides solutions, programs, and guidance to accelerate and de-risk the AWS journey. Innovation remains core to Tecan’s strategy as they continue their cloud transformation journey. Through AWS, Tecan is building the foundation for advanced data analytics and machine learning capabilities to strengthen their leadership in laboratory automation.

To learn more about starting your own cloud journey, visit Migrate and Modernize on AWS or explore more how AWS supports customer innovation in Healthcare & Life Sciences industry.