By Freya Purnell
Datacom has completed the success of the world’s largest production SAP migration to the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform.
New Zealand-based Zespri International’s global SAP platform and other applications were migrated to Microsoft Azure ahead of schedule, with the company’s Asia, Europe and New Zealand operations able to begin working immediately post-migration.
Zespri’s global kiwifruit sales totalled NZ$1.35 billion in 2013/14, and with strong growth expected in the coming years, the company needed its IT systems to accommodate this growth.
Datacom initially set up a test environment in Azure to test the performance of SAP in the cloud, which delivered response times equal to or better than onshore. The promising results were promising with a high degree of confidence that the SAP landscapes would run efficiently on Azure, perform appropriately, and continue to deliver value to the global business.
The key drivers for public cloud selection for this project were to improve scalability globally, reduce IT costs, insulate the business against the threat of natural disasters including earthquakes and tsunamis, increase unrealised SAP performance, and to enable Zespri to focus on its core business.
Andrew Goodin, global manager of information systems for Zespri said the cloud capabilities of Azure provides the ability to scale.
“We can bump up Azure performance in minutes by adding additional resources, which is not possible in the on-premises world. This means less friction and no interruption to our business operations, which provides Zespri with real value,” Goodin says.
The migration involved approximately 230 Microsft Azure Virtual Machines running in the western US Azure data centre, with workloads georeplicated to other Azure data centres outside the US to further mitigate against disasters.
Having the workloads running outside of New Zealand provides the global reach that Zepri, which operates in 53 countries, requires for their international workforce and distribution network.
