Azure over AWS for South Africa’s largest fabric company

Learn how our clients cut costs, consolidated resources and ramped up their productivity by migrating to the Cloud.

Year:

2018

Industry:

Retail

Organisation Size:

Medium (50-999 employees)

Products and Services:

Azure
Azure Backup
Azure Disaster Recovery

Case Studies

Hertex

With the addition of new product lines to an already successful fabric business, Hertex outgrew their aging ERP system. Operating from multiple showrooms nationwide, logistics became a nightmare when stock levels couldn’t be monitored accurately in real-time. Azure was selected to take their new ERP system to the cloud and has resulted in significant CapEx savings. Training of end users to drive adoption has resulted in successful use of cloud technology.

Business Problem

Hertex is the largest fabric company in South Africa. Since it’s humble beginnings in 1987, the company has grown into a décor destination that includes a finely curated homeware collection. They have 16 showrooms nationwide.

The need to make changes to their ERP system was very clear, Ludwig Hartmann, general manager explains: “In the past, we hosted our server infrastructure on-premises at our head office with multiple branches connecting to it. Problematic internet connections, aging hardware and the threat of power outages, resulted in lost revenue.”

The Solution

In April 2017, Crimson Line migrated 260+ users from Novell GroupWise to Office 365. The project was a resounding success as it was coupled with user training to drive adoption. The next phase in updating the data infrastructure was to implement a new ERP system. The ERP implementation vendor had recommended AWS over other solutions. The vendor claimed that since their software had not been tested on Azure, they couldn’t guarantee that it would not cause problems.

Crimson Line has been Hertex’s IT partner since 2010 and motivated to Microsoft that a Proof of Concept be authorized to gain, not only a new client, but also initiate discussions around Azure with the vendor.

“Microsoft Azure held many benefits for us. We didn’t have to invest in generators and additional infrastructure. The scalability of Azure means that we only pay for what we need right now”, says Hartmann of the solution. In the end it was clear that Microsoft Azure was the right choice to host Hertex’s new financial system.

Process

It was decided that the old and new ERP systems would run parallel for a period to allow for software development of the new system. As this would be a new installation it wasn’t possible to use the Azure cost estimator tool to gauge specification perimeters. Thus, Crimson Line met the financial system software vendor to determine:

how many servers the system required;
what the operating system requirements were; and
what the licensing requirements were.

Crimson Line, being a Microsoft Network Partner holding various gold and silver competencies, discussed the vendor provided specifications with a local Microsoft technical expert in lieu of the Azure cost estimator. It was identified that the vendor over specified the system requirements. This meant the number of servers could be reduced from three to two.

Crimson Line set up the servers in a secure hybrid environment and began fine tuning the specifications in accordance with best practice methodologies for databases in Azure. Azure Backup and Azure Disaster Recovery was included in the installation. The new ERP system is running optimally on Microsoft Azure with full deployment planned for the beginning of the new financial year.

Deliverables

Azure discovery and best practices

Scope solution with customer and vendor

Deploy PoC

Reduce on-premises footprint

Key Customer Benefits

Increased reliability

Reduced local server footprint

Reduced IT cost through eliminating server maintenance

Scalability

Eliminated capital expenditure

More Case Studies

Stay up-to-date with the latest
Crimson Case Studies

Lewis Stores

Lewis Stores move to the cloud

When you’re a national retailer with hundreds of stores nationwide, server replacement is a significant capital expenditure. A cloud solution negates the purchase of new hardware while it has many additional benefits any business can benefit from.

redPanda Software

Aging hardware no longer needs to be a worry

Hosting your own data center means you need to keep track of hardware related issues. Software developers, redPanda, moved ahead of the curve by extending its data centre into Azure before hardware needed to be replaced.

Warwick Estate

Enterprise capabilities for a regional wine estate

The food and beverage industry is a fast moving, competitive one. Warwick Estate’s beautiful vineyards, cellars, restaurant and picnic area is part of the Stellenbosch Winelands. They needed a communication and data technology system that would allow for ease of use but using an ISP email solution was making this difficult. The estate’s location outside of Stellenbosch, meant that their options for internet connectivity was limited. But Crimson Line assured them, limited connectivity didn’t need to keep them out of the cloud.

Get in touch with Crimson Line?

Send us an email, give us a call or pop into our offices and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!

086 111 4496

info@crimsonline.co.za

Offices

Click here for more

Testimonials

Here’s what customers say about Crimson Line

“Honestly what a pleasure to deal with such an efficient company to handle all your IT and Software. The team, sales and engineers, are all super-efficient and handled our company’s software migration with flying colours. If you are looking for a superb, responsive, cost-effective IT company to solve your IT nightmares, look no further. I would recommend them to any company, big or small”.