A word from our founder

I’m Arwel Owen and I’m passionate about removing both unnecessary carbon and cost from SAP systems and cloud services. I’m extremely privileged to have been born and bred on the beautiful Isle of Anglesey, off the north-west coast of Wales. I’ve based Avilastar here, in the shadows of the awe-inspiring Eryri mountain range, where inspiration is only ever a glance away from the office window.

SAP has dominated my career for almost 30 years, starting at Kwik Save in the mid-1990s when it opted to run SAP as a means to mitigate the very real threat (at the time!) posed by the Y2K bug. After Kwik Save, I moved to Princes Ltd in Liverpool, and there I stayed for over 20 years, leading a team of SAP BASIS, Infrastructure, Security and Communications Architects. It was at Princes that I learned the huge importance of building and operating SAP in a highly efficient, least-cost manner. Princes was one of the first companies in the UK to move SAP to AWS, and we cut our SAP operations cost by over 40% in doing so.

In recent years, since jumping the fence to the consultancy world, so many clients have complained to me that SAP on Cloud is costing them even more than on-premise ever did. I couldn’t fathom why, when we achieved such big savings at Princes. My EUREKA! moment came on a walk along the Anglesey coastline, when I realised that what we’d achieved at Princes not only cut our cloud spend, but also greatly reduced our carbon emissions. As soon as that thought entered my mind, it stuck, and it has never left. With the vision finally in place, I set about figuring out how to measure and reduce the carbon emissions of SAP systems, and do so in an achievable manner.

All too often, I’ve found sustainability is made to sound too difficult to achieve, with no obvious easy starting point for clients. Since I’m a firm believer that every adventure starts with a single step, my mission for Avilastar is to leverage modest, proven and achievable changes to reduce carbon emissions and kickstart clients SAP sustainability journeys. This might include snoozing an inactive Development system over a weekend, or measuring the carbon impact of optimising an inefficient SQL statement. The most important thing is to take that first step, measure its benefit and celebrate the wins.