Maersk unlocks innovation by modernizing SAP on Azure at petabyte scale

A strategic response to supply chain complexity

Global logistics leader Maersk operates at the heart of commerce.

“Our industry faces daily volatility—geopolitical, economic, and regulatory—which disrupts sourcing strategies and customer planning,” says Roman Kulczykowski, Senior Director, SAP Technology Platform, Platform Architecture at Maersk. “Adding to this complexity is the data fragmentation across our partners and systems—a concern when every shipping transaction requires successful completion of the invoice before it moves on.” Volatility can disrupt consumer access to critical goods and cause significant business losses across the supply chain ecosystem. 

Maersk needed to modernize its SAP ERP backbone while maintaining uninterrupted operations across thousands of live transactions. “This wasn’t just a migration. It was a mindset shift. We needed to move from managing infrastructure to driving engineering innovation,” Kulczykowski reflects. 

Engineering speed and precision within a trusted technology relationship

“We pride ourselves on our customer service—making new growth opportunities accessible to businesses of all sizes, all over the world,” says Tony Clarke, Senior Engineering Manager, SAP Technology Platform, Platform Architecture at Maersk. “We do this by providing real-time information on our shipments, predictive analytics, and data insights, and that all takes a huge amount of data and data performance. Microsoft Azure was the clear choice to modernize our SAP workloads.”  

Replatforming 500 servers and a petabyte of data to Azure typically takes 18 to 24 months. Maersk’s leadership challenged that norm. “We didn’t treat this as an SAP migration,” Clarke says. “We treated it as an infrastructure mission. It just happened to be running SAP.” Maersk implemented Azure Blueprints, a governance tool that cloud architects and IT administrators use to define and deploy a repeatable set of Azure resources, speeding decision-making and deployment. 

The team set a 6- to 9-month timeline, defined a squad-based structure, and added specialist skills as needed, aiming to deliver across Maersk’s development, preproduction, and production systems. Clarke recounts, “It was a hot standby followed by a controlled failover. The coordination was exacting precision—hour-by-hour planning, starting weeks in advance. It was a project we delivered in six months.”

“In terms of cutting over from our longstanding datacenter environments to our new cloud-enabled solutions, we surpassed our estimate,” says Kulczykowski. The team built 500 servers in three weeks with near 100% uptime and zero post-migration incidents. “Everyone I’ve spoken to has been amazed at the speed we managed to move business-critical workloads,” Clarke adds. “It was down to hard work, planning, and the right technology.”

Cost savings, resilience, and improved security posture 

Business value was immediate. “This wasn’t about unlocking new features,” Kulczykowski emphasizes. “It was about remediating technical debt and reducing costs by using Azure. Every dollar saved from maintaining heritage systems is a dollar we can invest in innovation and customer-facing assets.” He adds that transitioning to Azure improved Maersk’s cybersecurity posture by replacing outdated infrastructure, reducing vulnerabilities and attack vectors, and supporting a Secure by Design environment.

Post-migration, Maersk gained autonomy over its SAP systems, eliminating reliance on third-party vendors. Internal teams could design, build, and run their platforms, accelerating responsiveness and innovation. “The institutional knowledge our team had was key,” Clarke says. “If we’d brought in a third party, they might have succeeded—but not at this speed, and not with zero incidents.” 

Future-ready: AI-powered logistics and strategic growth

For Maersk, the migration was a strategic modernization. “This program was a foundational building block,” Kulczykowski says. “It’s essential groundwork for using advanced tools and driving business agility.”

Maersk is combining Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models with SAP to support internal teams and strengthen its customer service. “We’re enabling our teams to ask SAP questions in natural language, such as ‘Where is my invoice? Has it been approved? Where is my container?’” Clarke explains. “We’re using AI to extract, enrich, and interrogate data across systems. This is just the beginning.”

For enterprise decision‑makers, Maersk’s experience shows how planning, internal expertise, and technology partnerships can support secure, cost‑effective, and future-ready transformation.

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