Thisauto parts supplier has a problem many traditional companies face, companies that do not have the luxury startup companies have: just rent an app or any cloud solution and scale on demand. Companies such as our customer have developed their own custom supply chain software. This tool is the most valuable thing they have and generally meets their demand well... until they faced performance issues. That’s when they turned to comdivision to have their infrastructure analyzed to find the culprit.
With 2,400 employees, this company specializes in electrical parts for the car industry. “We develop and produce electronic parts for the numerous applications and have a large network of suppliers” said the CIO “our Supply Chain Management system kind of grew with us”he continued “we constantly added new suppliers, and functions, because that’s what the business demanded”. Now they were experiencing performance issues with the system.“The initial job was planned as a health check"remembers Tobias Paschek, comdivision’s lead architect on the case “but pretty soon my job turned into much more than that!”
Paschek saysthat they were very hesitant about the reliability of ‘the cloud’and didn’t really know much beyond about different options “we were having lunch when we started talking about this and that” Paschek recalled “they were talking about the privacy issues they had with cloud computing in general, but a minute later were talking how the Office 365 integration went. That’s when I couldn’t help but saying ‘so you are already in the Cloud’”, Paschek laughed “anyway, that was the opener for a general discussion and me proposing to check out VMware Cloud on AWS”. Paschek was able to but their confidentiality and privacy concerns at ease and the customer realized quickly that this could be the answer to their problems.
With VMware Cloud on AWS, the customer would be able to move the workloads into the cloud without any refactoring of the old system. Paschek explained: “we did a proof of concept with the customer and were able to connect the customer’s datacenter to the VMC on AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instance inside two hours and another 30 minutes later we had the first VM running off-prem.”
The customer was impressed, but not just about the speed of how quickly the datacenter was expanded, but also about Paschek’s ability to explain the technology in detail. “You can tell that Tobi does this for a living” the infrastructure lead said “because it’s one thing to know all this stuff, but another to teach the subject in ways that resonate with the recipient”, he continued “Tobias explained to us, how quickly we could consume AWS Services from there, which will make our development department happy, when they don’t have to procure all their tools by themselves!” ...oh, and the SCM software is now able to scale quickly and on demand –and it also brings forward the on-going Cloud native app strategy. “...and if we finally retire the app, we could easily scale back, but I don’t see that happening” the head of infrastructure said “but it’s nice to have the option and it helps with the budget discussions.”
