Published on the 14/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk

In what Datacom’s director of cloud and enterprise tools, Rob Purdy, says is a world first, Datacom has put Zespri International’s SAP production environment into the Azure cloud. While other companies have moved their disaster recovery, test and development systems to the Azure cloud, Zespri, the world’s largest kiwifruit exporter with US$1.5 billion in sales is the first to move its SAP production environment to Azure, reducing its IT costs by up to $US1 million in the process.

Until the move to Azure, Zespri’s IT systems, including the company’s business-critical SAP software, ran on-premise in several locations across New Zealand. Zespri relies heavily on SAP to support and manage virtually every aspect of its business from receipt of 3.3 billion pieces of the fruit through storage, shipping, sales and paying growers.

Following the disruption of a deadly virus that hit New Zealand kiwifruit orchards in 2011 and the devastating Canterbury earthquakes of the same year, Zespri saw its business, which had been set to double sales and triple revenues by 2025 take a nosedive. Zespri’s management realised that it needed more resilient systems to accommodate the significant ups and downs the business experienced.
“We became very concerned that we didn’t have an adequate disaster recovery plan for our IT systems. We needed a data centre strategy that would allow us to scale our IT up or down as the business climate demanded,” said Andrew Goodin, global manager of information systems at Zespri.

Zespri went to market with an RFP on how to revamp its IT infrastructure for cost efficiency, disaster resilience, and scalability. Several vendors replied with recommendations to move to the cloud but, while Zespri agreed that the cloud made sense, it was concerned about performance, security, and support for running SAP in the cloud. Datacom recommended Microsoft’s Azure which combines software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) over infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to eventually support all Zespri’s IT infrastructure needs.

The deal was helped along by an agreement in May this year between Microsoft and SAP to support many of its modules on Azure in the cloud. This means that customers can deploy and provision a number of preconfigured SAP solutions within minutes directly to Azure using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library tool.

Datacom helped Zespri set up a test environment in Azure to test the performance of SAP in the cloud and Zespri was happy with the results achieving the criteria of response times of less than one second. With the help of Datacom it now expects to have all of its SAP production applications and other critical business systems running on virtual machines in the western US Azure datacentre by the end of 2014. In addition to SAP, Zespri is also migrating its Microsoft SharePoint Server collaboration environment and a number of custom applications to Azure. It is also moving its Microsoft Exchange Server email system to Microsoft Office 365, which will provide it with a suite of Microsoft cloud productivity services.

By moving its entire SAP environment and other critical applications to Microsoft Azure, Zespri will reduce its IT costs by between $US700,000 to $US1 million as well as having a more robust disaster recovery environment and instant scalability. As Goodin put it, moving to the cloud is freeing his company to focus on kiwifruit instead of servers.

“We are a sales and marketing company, not a technology company. You can’t be an expert in everything, and want to focus on kiwi. By running SAP in Azure, we can focus on growing and selling kiwifruit. We’re happy to let Microsoft and our partner Datacom manage our IT infrastructure so we can scale without limits.”