Zespri hops up to the cloud

Datacom New Zealand has completed the world's largest production SAP migration to the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform on behalf of Tauranga-based kiwifruit marketing entity Zespri International.

From its Mount Maunganui location, local IT integrator and service partner Datacom has successfully migrated Zespri's global platform for SAP - its enterprise software - and other applications to Microsoft Azure, say the two companies.

Zespri operates in 53 countries and multiple timezones. The migration was seamless, completed ahead of schedule, and was so successful that Zespri Asia, Zespri Europe, and Zespri New Zealand could begin working off those systems immediately post- migration, said Scott Green, director of ITM Datacom.

"It's a great example of how a collaborative partnership between Zespri, Datacom and Microsoft can deliver a world first," said Mr Green.

The kiwifruit industry is estimating strong growth as it recovers from Psa and Zespri hopes to increase export revenues from $1.35 billion in 2013-14 to $3 billion by 2025. Zespri has factored the projected growth into its IT planning. Zespri said it could not disclose the cost of the upgrade for reasons of commercial confidentiality.

"Datacom had the flexibility, technical knowledge, and can-do attitude to help us evaluate Azure and work toward our target of 100 per cent public cloud," said Andrew Goodin, global manager of information systems for Zespri.

The key drivers towards the public cloud selection for the 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 enable Zespri to focus on its core business, said Mr Goodin.

"You can't be an expert in everything, and we wanted to focus on our core product, kiwifruit, and let our partners Datacom and Microsoft manage our IT infrastructure so we can scale without constraints," he said.

"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."

Datacom's Mr Green said the company had the ability to support the full spectrum of approaches, local virtual cloud solutions for secure high performance, through to geographically distributed hybrid solutions.

"We have a solid, longstanding partnership with Microsoft," said David Duffy, general manager of Datacom Midlands, "While every customer has different needs, the Azure platform was a very good fit for Zespri - with a strong value proposition."