For over a hundred years, this power technology company has designed and developed engine systems and is now a multinational corporation spanning 190 countries and employing 58,000 people around the world, providing sustainable power with purpose.
To improve costs and efficiency, the company intends to close all its data centres over the next few years but had faced problems trying to find an environment where its legacy applications would be supported in the cloud.
A struggle to move IBM i legacy applications into the cloud
Around 13% of this customer’s annual global revenue – approximately $16 billion – depended on their on-premises IBM i systems across EMEA, APAC and Mexico.
With plans to retire the hardware, they needed a cloud platform to house these environments. The overriding problem was that many hosting solutions couldn’t support the legacy applications that run on the IBM i V5R4 operating system.
Service Express was able to provide a unique IBM i solution that not only supported their legacy operating system (which could not be supported by other providers) but also with a substantial cost saving, enabling their significant ERP system to continue to run efficiently and cost effectively on the V5R4 environment.
Service Express have been providing hardware maintenance to the customer on their on-premise equipment for many years. With an established and trusted relationship, discussions took place around hosting which led to a review of the capabilities of their Tier IV by design data centre. Security credentials at the site are extremely high, which was a factor in the customer’s decision to move to the cloud under the expertise of Service Express.
Service Express invited the customer to perform connectivity, integration and performance benchmark testing so that they could review and signoff their acceptance criteria before moving into the cloud. This was a critical proof of concept (POC) activity to ensure that the remainder of the LPARs could be migrated into the Service Express Specialty Cloud.
Industry:
Power technology
Location:
Cambridge, UK
Service: Migration to Specialty Cloud for IBM Power solution
“I don’t know how we would have done it, if you were not able support IBM i V5R4.”
– Global Service Owner, Power Technology Company
An award-winning seamless migration
The migration of the customer business units took place over the course of around ten weekends, with global visibility for the client at the highest levels. There were no functional changes to how the Movex environment operated, with integrations such as CUMPAS, EDI and 3PL performing as usual.
Service Express met with the staff to take a deep dive assessment to fully understand their system requirements including applications, integrations, current performance and future growth. Using a backup from each LPAR, the workloads we restored into the Service Express Specialty Cloud, connectivity, application and performance benchmark testing were performed and approved prior to each LPAR going live in the cloud. A final refresh of data was performed to ensure there was minimal disruption to the online availability of the customer’s systems.
The employees were certainly impressed that the move was implemented without a hitch.
“Wow, seamless to the business – well done team! Thank you for your laser focus on execution and moving the needle on our broader renovation effort to accelerate to the cloud!”
– Distribution Business Unit CIO, Power Technology Company
In recognition of this trouble-free transition, Service Express was awarded ‘Best Supplier Innovations Indirect Sourcing,’ which they were very proud to receive. An outcome that they certainly hadn’t expected, they were just so pleased that the solution and migration exceeded customer expectations.
Result Highlights:
- Entire customer estate migrated into the cloud on time, as agreed
- 24/7×365 service desk – essential to meet operations spanning many time zones around the globe
- Proof of concept available to test all aspects of the non-production LPARs prior to migrating the production LPARs into the cloud as signoff
- Fully hosted managed service performed daily
- Award-winning seamless migration
- Substantial saving of $2.4 million in operational costs
A move made with the confidence of capabilities
Through the extensive hosting capabilities of Service Express, there are 16 partitions now in the cloud, each dedicated to operations in territories like Australia, Europe, China and Singapore. Another two environments are scheduled to be set up to expand the cloud-based footprint and to establish more cost savings through the reduction of on-premise hardware.
Also under consideration for the future is a project to migrate mainframe hardware into the cloud. Service Express already has a strong reputation on maintenance for this type of server and has placed many mainframes into the cloud with the same ease and support applied to mid-range transitions.
Service Express successfully migrated 16 LPARs into the cloud over a 4-month period, hosting both production and non-production workloads running V5R4 and V7R3 operating systems, a fully hosted managed service is being performed on a daily basis.
“The Service Express IBM i solution has enabled us to be able to migrate all our applications out of our data centres, including the IBM i environment. That was our key goal, as well as not having to commit to a capital outlay for keeping these servers on-prem and refreshing that hardware every three to five years as we were doing.”
– Global Service Owner, Power Technology Company
Thanks to the expertise of Service Express, $2.4 million in operational savings has been achieved through establishing cloud-based hosting for the engine developer’s AS/400 Movex environment.
In recognition of this outstanding work, Service Express were honoured to receive the ‘Best Supplier Innovations Indirect Sourcing Award’ from the customer.
