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- Hello and welcome, Claude.
So glad to have you here with us today.
I would love to hear a little bit about Planzer,
a little about yourself to start the conversation.
- Thank you for having me.
My name is Claude.
I'm a Team Leader in Planzer's IT Infrastructure team.
So, Planzer offers sustainable
and environmentally-friendly logistics services
in Switzerland, in Germany,
in France, and as well, in Italy.
We value decency, respect, fairness,
and motivation for everyone,
so that's the reason why we call ourself as a family.
- I love hearing about your company
and the mission-driven part of that.
Now, maybe you can talk a little bit
about the company's decision to go to cloud and migrate,
and why Azure?
- Microsoft was already a strategic partner of Planzer,
and we operated outdated hardware in a data center,
so we wanted to reduce all the on-premise hardware,
and we decided to move towards Microsoft.
It was a natural decision, and with Enterprise Connect,
it was very, very easy to connect our services to Azure.
It was basically like another data center.
- Great, and let me ask a second question.
What was the experience like preparing and executing
for your migration?
- The goal of the project was to migrate those 200,
around 200 servers we had on the on-premise hardware.
Including replication, testing, and performing the systems,
the migration to Azure took around seven months.
It included all, including the governance.
We wanted this migration to Azure to make it very easy,
but in addition, we wanted also
that our team is very, very much involved
and able to maintain later, the whole system,
and we achieved that goal, so we are able now to maintain,
by ourself, the whole Azure environment.
So, we just transferred the servers
from our on-premise hardware to the Azure environment,
and the process was extremely easy.
We had very reliable and fast tools from Microsoft.
We were able, even during this migration process,
to offer already new services
to our internal and external customers,
so it was a very satisfying process.
- That journey sounds ideal, and when we talked before,
you mentioned the Azure Migration and Modernization Program
was critical in making that whole story
as smooth as possible.
Could you share more about that program?
- The project was in time, it was within the cost frame,
and it was definitely smooth.
We planned from the beginning enough resources.
Of course, not all was easy,
but with the FastTrack for Azure,
we had like a key success factor for the project
because every time, when we had a problem,
it was clear we were able to contact our AMMP local team
here in Switzerland.
They helped us with any issues that we faced.
They were not big issues but, you know,
questions and insecurities,
maybe also how to do it in the best way.
They understood very, very fast what was our purpose
of question or what was our question in general,
and they were able to solve all our open topics,
so that was a very, very confident move from Microsoft
that they offered us that team,
and we were constantly in contact with the AMMP team.
- It's so awesome to hear
our teams worked so closely together for that success,
but now that you're through the recent migration projects,
how is Planzer positioned to continue navigating
this bigger digital transformation journey?
- After we moved old servers,
the last step was to remove the hardware out
from the data center.
We turned all into digital,
or all into the services from Azure,
so we implemented the automated update process,
which we haven't before.
Before, it was manually.
We have now the automated update process.
We integrated Azure Backup, not only for the VMs,
for the virtual machines,
but also for the remaining servers
because, of course, we're a big company.
We have some remaining hardware.
It's also integrated in Azure.
We are now recognizing more and more the advantages
of Azure.
- Well, congratulations, Claude.
You've really led an amazing evolution at your company.
It's just a moment when you can turn the lights off
on a closed data center.
Final question for you,
would you mind sharing a little bit more on Planzer
and your focus on sustainability?
Such a hot topic these days,
would love to hear from you about that.
- So, we as Planzer and as a family company
in the third generation, we think and act in the interests
of the coming generations.
Following our core values,
60% of our customers' general cargo
is transported by low-emissions rail,
so, we have, in so many places in Switzerland and abroad,
connection points to the rail system,
that we are able to do more than half with rail
instead of trucks.
We are used to work with shared resources
and services on demand,
and we use only that what is needed for that moment.
We are going now to transform our complete software
that we use daily, our daily software, with Azure,
so we are still ongoing with Azure
and renewing our whole IT system.
- Claude, thank you for your time today.
It's been inspiring to hear about your journey
and how it links to the Planzer
really mission-driven culture,
and then learning about kind of sustainability
and this new model of how to work for these solutions
on the planet.
It's been amazing.
Thank you so much for your time today.
- Very much, thank you very much for having me.
(exciting music)
- Hello and welcome, Gerhard.
Nice to have you join us.
Can you tell us a little bit about Jotun
and your IT focus as the CIO?
- Hi, Merrie, and thanks for inviting me.
Jotun is one of the world's leading paints
and coating manufacturers.
Our IT mission is to support Jotun's growth ambition,
improve operational efficiency, and develop people
by use of information and technology.
To do this, we must establish a robust
and flexible IT environment where we can react quickly
to new business requests and demands.
The business simply wants prompt response
on high-availability services.
Our IT organization want to focus
on helping the business create value,
utilizing a continuous flow of new functionality.
Azure cloud services enable us to do this.
- Great, that's really interesting.
I hadn't understood Jotun's scope before, it's global.
Can you walk us briefly
through Jotun's cloud journey to date?
- Yes, I can do that, Merrie.
In the past, we've done all our key business application
on-premises in our own data centers.
It began to change in 2016 when we moved from IBM Notes
to Microsoft Office 365.
This marked our real first move to the public cloud.
By 2018, we had seen a lot of benefits
that the cloud could offer.
Moving to Infrastructure as a Service enabled us
to stop worrying about the hardware,
but most of the older distractions
on managing a data center remained,
including backups, patching, and schedule management
to do software upgrades.
The time and effort we spent on routine system management
and administration was still extensive and costly,
so we started modernizing
our remaining on-premise applications to run
in fully managed PaaS services on Azure,
which we called the lift-and-modernize approach.
- It's great to hear about your journey.
I also understand you had, recently,
an application modernization project with Azure,
and our Azure Migration and Modernization Program helped you
with planning and execution.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
- Yes, I can do that, Merrie.
In starting the project back in October 2020,
we utilized what we called a lift-and-modernize approach.
To help ensure its success, we enlisted
in the Microsoft Azure Migration and Modernization Program,
which included support from Infosys,
a certified Azure Managed Service Provider.
After alignment discussion,
Infosys and our Azure FastTrack team,
we established an Azure landing zone.
The landing zone gave us an Azure environment
that was ready to support application modernization
and migration at the enterprise scale,
including the Azure resources needed for scalability,
security, governance, identity,
networking, and management.
There is no way we could have completed this
in less than a year, I would say, without the help
from Azure Migration and Modernization Program and Infosys.
- That sounds fantastic.
Now, in the end, what were the outcomes and business value
that you had an opportunity to realize
following the Azure Migration
and Modernization Program engagement?
- Today, online applications are running
in production on Azure.
As for their associated development,
test, and QA environments, the rollout was done
without business interruption
and feedback to date has been largely positive.
To customer, the application generally look
and feel the same, but they are more stable
and perform better, which is exactly what we set out
to deliver from a customer point of view.
Software releases have accelerated
from two to three every year
to having releases every two to three weeks.
We have now much better visibility into the cost
of each application, enabling us to pinpoint cost elements
and apply Azure tools to further optimize total cost
of the applications.
- So I guess the natural question is what's next?
What are your next steps for modernization and hybrid,
and how does Azure play into the role in your vision?
- Yeah, Merrie, we have just started the journey.
We are already working on a few new projects
and will continue to modernize more applications
under our ongoing cloud-first strategy.
There will also be other areas
where we need to look into modernization
and we'll use Azure cloud services,
such as in data services and analytics,
AI and machine learning, and Azure Stack HCI.
We need to continue to prepare
and meet the different new demands
coming from all business lines,
and Azure plays a vital role in this vision.
- Gerhard, thank you.
This has been so informative.
Thank you for Jotun, thank you for this great partnership.
I appreciate you being here with us.
- Thank you very much, Merrie,
and thank you for letting me share our story.
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