The fol­low­ing Part­ner Insight was authored by Jack­ie Allen, Direc­tor, Glob­al Part­ner Mar­ket­ing, Microsoft. 

At this year’s SAP Sap­phire, enter­prise lead­ers gath­ered to share how they’re using cloud, data, and AI to solve some of their biggest busi­ness challenges.

Among the cus­tomer sto­ries high­light­ed was Medline’s large-scale migra­tion of its SAP envi­ron­ment to Microsoft Azure, detailed in a pan­el dis­cus­sion fea­tur­ing lead­ers from Med­line, Pro­tera, and Intel. For the med­ical sup­ply com­pa­ny, which man­u­fac­tures and dis­trib­utes med­ical and sur­gi­cal sup­plies glob­al­ly while pro­vid­ing clin­i­cal and sup­ply chain exper­tise to health­care facil­i­ties, the tran­si­tion proved trans­for­ma­tive. It ulti­mate­ly enabled Med­line to launch Empow­er, an AI-pow­ered dig­i­tal con­trol tow­er that helps health­care providers antic­i­pate sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions before they affect patient care.

The migra­tion ran on Intel-pow­ered Azure infra­struc­ture, includ­ing large-mem­o­ry Azure VM inno­va­tions and proces­sor-lev­el opti­miza­tions devel­oped joint­ly by Intel, Microsoft, and SAP to sup­port Medline’s demand­ing SAP workloads.

For Med­line, the move to Azure was always about more than infra­struc­ture mod­ern­iza­tion. The goal was a dig­i­tal foun­da­tion capa­ble of turn­ing data into deci­sions and unlock­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of AI-pow­ered sup­ply chain innovation.

Build­ing a Plat­form for Growth

For Jason Kaley, who over­sees IT oper­a­tions, infra­struc­ture, cloud plat­forms, and tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion at Med­line, the migra­tion was dri­ven by long-term busi­ness needs rather than short-term infra­struc­ture goals.

“We were look­ing for some­thing that had the scale and the resilien­cy that we need­ed to sup­port our busi­ness, as well as a mod­ern­ized plat­form for us to build inno­va­tions on,” Kaley said.

Mov­ing a live SAP envi­ron­ment to the cloud required far more than relo­cat­ing workloads.

“This wasn’t a green­field build­out,” Kaley said. ​“This was our live pro­duc­tion oper­a­tions. We’re a 24×7 com­pa­ny, and it required flaw­less exe­cu­tion and coor­di­na­tion across all our busi­ness, our cus­tomers, as well as all of our tech­ni­cal partners.”

Part of that coor­di­na­tion cen­tered on infra­struc­ture that did not yet exist when plan­ning began. The project includ­ed the roll­out of Azure’s new Intel® Xeon®-based 32-ter­abyte Mv3 vir­tu­al machines, the first VMs of that scale to be deployed and a crit­i­cal piece of the project’s requirements.

“We had a large plan­ning exer­cise real­ly try­ing to fig­ure out tim­ing-wise whether they would be avail­able for us to take advan­tage of and pro­vide that scal­a­bil­i­ty that we were after by the time the project was done,” Kaley said.

Med­line hit every tar­get it set.

“We were able to migrate large, com­plex SAP work­loads with no down­time, right on sched­ule, right on bud­get,” Kaley said. ​“It was a resound­ing success.”

From Vis­i­bil­i­ty to Deci­sion Intelligence

Med­line began build­ing on the new foun­da­tion imme­di­ate­ly. The result was Empow­er, a dig­i­tal con­trol tow­er designed to help health­care providers see sup­ply chain risk and respond before dis­rup­tions reach patient care.

Kaley is quick to dis­tin­guish it from tra­di­tion­al report­ing tools.

“The key that makes Empow­er unique is it isn’t just a report­ing plat­form, and it isn’t just sup­ply chain ana­lyt­ics,” he said. ​“It’s a deci­sion plat­form that allows us to move our health­care providers to proac­tive­ly address sup­ply chain risk and reduce the amount of effort and fric­tion it takes to address that in the end.”

The biggest dif­fer­ence is tim­ing. Inven­to­ry reports and back-order noti­fi­ca­tions his­tor­i­cal­ly arrived only after a dis­rup­tion, leav­ing hos­pi­tals and sup­ply chain teams react­ing to shortages.

“Reports and inven­to­ry posi­tions at risk would be very batch-report dri­ven,” Kaley explained. ​“A back order would occur, and then we would have to react after the point in time at which they need­ed product.”

Today, Empow­er ana­lyzes demand sig­nals across the sup­ply chain before orders are placed.

“The real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty moves that for­ward before the order is even placed,” he said. ​“It allows us to sense and see through dif­fer­ent demand sig­nals with­in the sup­ply chain where there’s risk and get set up to mit­i­gate that risk or pro­vide alter­na­tive prod­uct ahead of time.”

Kaley frames the goal in terms of patient care.

“Get­ting the right prod­uct at the right place at the right time to enable patient care is real­ly the stan­dard we hold our­selves to,” he said. ​“Doing that cost-effec­tive­ly with the least amount of fric­tion and labor from the hos­pi­tal is the sec­ond most impor­tant thing we can do.”

He cred­its the under­ly­ing plat­form with allow­ing Medline’s devel­op­ment teams to move quick­ly once the migra­tion was complete.

“The scale and speed of the Azure data plat­form and the under­ly­ing hard­ware infra­struc­ture has allowed us to build and inno­vate much faster,” Kaley said. ​“We were able to jump into the Empow­er devel­op­ment with­out wor­ry­ing about whether we had the infra­struc­ture or the skills to build out the under­ly­ing capabilities.” 

Why Part­ner­ship Mattered

Across the project, Med­line, Microsoft, Intel, and Pro­tera aligned around a shared busi­ness out­come rather than indi­vid­ual tech­ni­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties. That col­lab­o­ra­tion proved par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant as the team incor­po­rat­ed new Azure infra­struc­ture inno­va­tions while keep­ing the migra­tion on schedule.

Matt Clip­pinger, vice pres­i­dent of strate­gic alliances at Pro­tera, said projects of this scale suc­ceed or fail on that alignment.

“What we real­ly look toward is how we actu­al­ly help them achieve their desired busi­ness out­comes and what the busi­ness is try­ing to accom­plish,” Clip­pinger said. ​“Tech­nol­o­gy is just an enabler.”

In prac­tice, that meant serv­ing as a con­nec­tive lay­er across the ecosystem.

“We were real­ly the quar­ter­back between Microsoft and Intel and Med­line,” he said. ​“It was about align­ing all the right time­lines, under­stand­ing what the tech­nol­o­gy val­ue was going to be, and mak­ing sure we could achieve the busi­ness outcomes.”

Much of that work involved tech­nol­o­gy still arriv­ing in market.

“We part­nered well with Intel and the tech­nolo­gies they were bring­ing because some of it was cut­ting-edge and brand new to the scale that Med­line need­ed,” Clip­pinger said.

For Kaley, that exper­tise filled a gap Med­line could not close on its own.

“We had not done an Azure migra­tion,” he said. ​“Their knowl­edge of both Microsoft and Intel to help guide us and lead us along the way was real­ly a key part of our success.”

A sim­i­lar dynam­ic runs upstream, in how the plat­form itself is engi­neered. Bryan Hie­s­tand, an archi­tect at Intel work­ing with Microsoft Azure, described Intel’s stand­ing rela­tion­ship with both companies.

“We’re con­stant­ly work­ing with Microsoft, but also with SAP,” Hie­s­tand said. ​“We put a lot of effort not just into get­ting more cores into the proces­sor and per­for­mance improve­ments. We real­ly work with SAP on opti­miz­ing the soft­ware to run best and take advan­tage of all these accel­er­a­tors and instruc­tion sets that we have in the CPU.”

Kaley’s advice to orga­ni­za­tions plan­ning sim­i­lar trans­for­ma­tions is direct.

“You don’t have to go it alone,” he said. ​“Microsoft, Intel, and Pro­tera are fan­tas­tic part­ners. They do this every day and lend a tremen­dous amount of expertise.”

Just as impor­tant, he added, is treat­ing those rela­tion­ships as true part­ner­ships rather than cus­tomer-ven­dor engagements.

“Con­nect your­self. Have shared out­comes. Make it one team,” Kaley said. ​“There wasn’t a Med­line team and a Pro­tera team. We were one team oper­at­ing togeth­er with the same goal.”

What Comes Next

The migra­tion marked the begin­ning of a plat­form that con­tin­ues to evolve as new tech­nolo­gies arrive.

“Empow­er is a direct evo­lu­tion of the plan,” Kaley said. ​“We moved to Azure to pro­vide our­selves a plat­form to inno­vate on, and we were able to imme­di­ate­ly turn around and begin that inno­va­tion and cre­ate Empow­er, which is real­ly just in its begin­ning stages.”

That pace is con­tin­u­ing across the broad­er ecosys­tem. At SAP Sap­phire, Intel high­light­ed the avail­abil­i­ty of its lat­est Intel Xeon 6 proces­sors on Azure, which pow­er the upcom­ing Mv4 instances, includ­ing Mbv4, now in pri­vate pre­view. Intel also detailed work under­way to scale with CXL on Azure and to strength­en secu­ri­ty and data pro­tec­tion for enter­prise customers.

Hie­s­tand said hard­ware inno­va­tion today extends well beyond com­pute power.

“We have to have reli­a­bil­i­ty, we have to have secu­ri­ty, we have to have per­for­mance,” he said.

Among the capa­bil­i­ties he high­light­ed were Total Mem­o­ry Encryp­tion, enabled by default on Azure, and Intel’s TDX con­fi­den­tial com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy, which gives orga­ni­za­tions greater con­trol over sen­si­tive data and helps address grow­ing data sov­er­eign­ty requirements.

“That real­ly gives our cus­tomers con­trol of their data,” Hie­s­tand said. ​“As the need for improved secu­ri­ty is grow­ing, this tech­nol­o­gy will help our cus­tomers address those con­cerns around security.”

For Pro­tera, the next wave cen­ters on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and agen­tic AI.

“One of the things we’re real­ly excit­ed about is high­light­ing some of our BTP ser­vices,” Clip­pinger said. ​“The abil­i­ty to real­ly help cus­tomers solve busi­ness prob­lems much more quick­ly, lever­age AI where it makes sense for them, and real­ize the val­ue of that.”

That work, he said, will depend on the same ecosys­tem that car­ried the migration.

“We know that Pro­tera can’t do it alone,” Clip­pinger said. ​“We need strong part­ners like Intel. We need strong part­ners like Microsoft in order to bring the busi­ness desired out­comes that our cus­tomers are look­ing for.”

Medline’s expe­ri­ence demon­strates that SAP mod­ern­iza­tion is more than a cloud migra­tion. By com­bin­ing Azure, Intel-pow­ered infra­struc­ture, and a col­lab­o­ra­tive part­ner ecosys­tem, the com­pa­ny cre­at­ed a scal­able foun­da­tion for AI inno­va­tion, enabling new sup­ply chain capa­bil­i­ties that help health­care providers antic­i­pate dis­rup­tions, improve resilien­cy, and bet­ter serve patients.