SAP has been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure as a service (IaaS) since 2008. Over 600 SAP employees in more than 16 countries have directly used AWS, provisioning over 10,000 SAP systems on AWS. SAP's initial goals with AWS were to reduce IT costs and speed up prototyping from 4 weeks to deployment within weeks. SAP has since expanded its use of AWS across departments and built knowledge centers for cloud deployment and operations.