Sumitomo Corporation Selects AWS to Drive Its Digital Transformation

One of the world’s largest trading and business investment companies uses AWS to modernize its SAP platform, help customers achieve sustainability goals, and drive business insights across its 900 subsidiaries

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) recently announced that Sumitomo Corporation, a leading trading and investment conglomerate that operates 900 companies in 66 countries, is using AWS to power its digital transformation. As part of the multiyear initiative, Sumitomo Corporation will migrate its SAP environments to AWS and use a platform built on the world’s leading cloud provider to make data-driven business decisions, automate processes, and respond quickly to customer needs.

Sumitomo Corporation will use RISE with SAP on AWS, a fully managed offering that combines SAP’s solution and implementation experience with AWS's experience in helping customers transform their SAP landscapes. By migrating 16 groupwide, mission critical systems, such as sales and accounting, to the cloud, Sumitomo will modernize its SAP environment to SAP S/4HANA on AWS, and it will use SAP’s Business Technology Platform to connect data across its global operations. Sumitomo Corporation will also modernize its enterprise resource planning (ERP), integrating valuable business data with advanced analytics and AWS machine learning services to enhance customer interactions and internal processes.

Sumitomo Corporation is also using AWS machine learning to build applications that measure blue carbon to lower carbon footprints for organizations in Japan. For example, Sumitomo Corporation built a product that allows local governments to measure blue carbon, carbon dioxide that is absorbed from the atmosphere and stored in the ocean, in marine and coastal ecosystems, to help towns in Japan to earn carbon credits. Sumitomo Corporation group company InsightEdge uses Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth—a service that makes it easy to label raw data such as images, text files, and videos—to label aerial photographs. These pictures are taken by drones from Nileworks, a Sumitomo Corporation group company, to calculate the amount of blue carbon in marine seagrass and seaweed. Based on the results, towns can apply for blue carbon credits, which local governments can use to launch new sustainability projects.

Sumitomo Corporation has collaborated with AWS since 2017 to accelerate its digital transformation. As part of its move to the cloud, Sumitomo Corporation will promote the use of generative AI in its businesses and plans to drive innovation with AWS generative AI capabilities, including Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundational models available via an API, to drive productivity and uncover new ways to serve customers.

Driving innovation inside Sumitomo Corporation

SCSK, a Sumitomo Corporation Group company and AWS Premier Consulting Partner, helped Sumitomo Corporation build a secure platform on AWS to help employees access data and easily build applications using advanced cloud technologies. The modern cloud-based platform, dubbed the Sumitomo Corporation Digital Platform (SCDP), connects data across Sumitomo Corporation’s entire business. The platform is helping the company’s subsidiaries adjust to changing market dynamics and drive operational efficiencies across multiple business units, including metal products; transportation and construction systems; infrastructure; media and digital; real estate; as well as mineral resources, energy, chemical, and electronics.

“Since 2017, we have been leveraging AWS and its cloud technologies to drive digital transformation and accelerate the global growth of our business,” said Wataru Shiotani, corporate officer and general manager, Information Technology Planning and Promotions Department at Sumitomo Corporation. “The SCDP we built on AWS will allow us to bring our companies together to accelerate innovation, make better data-driven decisions, and leverage the latest technologies, like generative AI, to continuously improve our customer experience.”

“The scalability and reliability of AWS is critical to achieve Sumitomo Corporation’s digital transformation and data-driven management across our 900 companies in 66 countries,” said Toshihiro Sato, corporate officer and deputy general manager of the Cloud Service Division in the Solution Business Group at SCSK. “SCSK joined the AWS Partner Network in 2011, following the general availability of the AWS Region in Tokyo, to help more than 800 Japanese enterprise customers drive innovation and deliver on their commercial goals with AWS.”

“Sumitomo Corporation’s focus on pushing leading innovation over the last 100 years is why it remains a trusted company for millions of customers around the world,” said Tadao Nagasaki, president at AWS Japan. “Moving their most critical business applications to AWS with the support from SCSK allows Sumitomo Corporation to put data at the heart of its business. This move will help the company to automate processes securely, reduce operational costs, and improve experiences for the group’s employees and stakeholders.”