Dematic Achieves Infrastructure Efficiency Using Azure

About the Client: Dematic

As the world’s third-largest provider of intralogistics and materials handling solutions, Dematic has implemented more than 5,800 reliable, flexible and cost-effective supply chain systems globally. These systems are provided from manufacturing plants located in the United States, Europe, Australia and China, and supported around the world by a team of over 6,000 logistics professionals.

The Challenge

Offering global logistics software solutions required that Dematic have extensive compute resources and server space with a constant change in needs depending on the status of a development project.

After three years of using a third-party data center and 320+ servers for application development and other compute needs, Dematic suspected they were overpaying for their IT hardware and infrastructure since most of their servers were not actively being used and could not be turned off, an inefficiency negatively impacting their bottom line. To improve the efficiency of the compute needs critical to the business, Dematic launched an initiative to review in detail their existing IT infrastructure and assess options.

The Solution

Dataprise Airnet, a Gold Microsoft Partner, was engaged to perform the detailed assessment, and with the extensive amount of data provided by Dataprise’s Airnet Azure Foundation tools, to migrate from the third-party data center to the cloud.

Dataprise Airnet next assisted Dematic with developing and implementing an integrated infrastructure plan. Under our guidance and expertise, Dematic IT decision makers chose to deploy a hybrid cloud infrastructure, choosing Microsoft Azure over AWS as their cloud solution. 

• The Airnet Systems Assessment Tool (ASAT) was used to right-size Dematic’s infrastructure needs, providing detailed inventory, performance and cost data, as well as recommendations on numbers of VMs and subscriptions needed. 
• Dataprise Airnet Azure Foundations (AAF) was deployed, providing a pre-architected framework that allowed Dematic to have a secure, flexible and organized Azure environment in less than a day from which to launch the setup of their ASAT recommended 17 subscriptions.
• With best practices incorporated, AAF automatically created the subscriptions with the required subscription interconnectivity, resource groups and resources needed for an organization of Dematic’s size.
• In addition to the move to the cloud, Airnet helped troubleshoot and deploy ExpressRoute VPN to meet Dematic’s growing bandwidth requirement, avoiding public internet use and resulting in greater reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security than typical connections.

The Result

What might have been a multiple week process of addressing extensive questions within a global organization, where 2,000 users and 500 developers on three continents would be impacted, was simplified into three questions and a quick setup of a cloud environment using best practices, thanks to AAF.

Dematic was able to dramatically right-size their development team’s footprint, reducing their server needs from 320+ to only 40, resulting in a 25% cost savings and improved performance. Through use of optimization reporting Dematic was able to continue right-sizing machines to decrease annual cost by almost $400,000 on top of the initial savings.

The Benefits

Dematic’s move to Azure has allowed them exceptional flexibility and transparency of their development team’s infrastructure needs.

With autoscaling they are able to set their CPU, ram, and IOPS preferences and automatically scale their servers up or down, only paying for what they need. The Dematic IT team also has greater insight into who is doing what within their system with automated reports, including granular cost reporting by cost centers with Cloudyn providing the opportunity to implement cost saving strategies.