Under Armour’s Next Growth Stage Includes Deeper Analytic Investments

Under Armour’s recent tech investments include tapping into new analytic and machine learning capabilities.

The athletic retailer and brand has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for SAP in a move to increase resilience, enhance security, and provide more significant insights across its business. It completed the migration of its SAP environments to AWS earlier this year, developing a foundation intended to improve performance and visibility across its design, merchandising, planning, manufacturing, supply chain, and sales distribution channels.

The company will now integrate its SAP environments with AWS’ analytics, machine learning, compute and storage technologies, and the move is expected to improve Under Armour’s ability to fuel innovation in such areas as 3D apparel and footwear design, digitally connected footwear and apparel, direct-to-consumer sales, global wholesale distribution, and more resource-efficient production.

[See also: Under Armour’s Consumer-Direct Playbook Streamlines Digital Efforts]

Danny Miles, Under Armour chief technology officer, said the partnership will help the apparel company enter its next stage of growth. This includes being able to apply deep analytics and machine learning capabilities to drive greater efficiency across the business, as well as optimize product innovation processes to deliver more omnichannel, premium consumer experiences.

The migration to the SAP cloud was said to take less than six months. As part of this, the No. 97 consumer goods company moved its ERP, supply network collaboration, global trade services, enterprise reporting, integration (PI/PO, data services), SAP Fiori, and solution manager workloads to AWS.

It subsequently implemented AWS’ CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, expected to help maintain optimum system performance and minimize downtime and data loss.