Enabling growth by moving a critical legacy application to cloud

Packaged goods manufacturer | Manufacturing

Business opportunity

With over a million customers and tens of thousands of deliveries per day, this multibillion-dollar consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturer depends on its billing and distribution application to support its day-to-day operations. As its business grew, maintaining an on-premises infrastructure for this and other key systems was becoming increasingly costly and complex.

To improve its ability to scale and reduce operational costs, the manufacturer decided to adopt a cloud-first strategy. The company looked for a way to migrate core applications to its preferred Microsoft Azure platform while minimizing the risk of disruption to the business.

Technical challenge

The CPG company’s billing and distribution application was a key target for cloud migration, but achieving this goal presented some tough technical challenges.

The application is a 30 year old legacy system running on IBM AIX on the IBM Power platform. As the organization gradually scaled out its storage for Power, it began to hit the IOPS limits of the environment, making stability a pressing concern.

To improve availability, the manufacturer wanted to accelerate the cloud migration of its billing and distribution application by avoiding the need to re-code, re-factor or re-platform it.

 

Our solution

Together with Kyndryl and its systems integration partner, the company used Kyndryl Skytap on Azure to shift its billing and distribution application to the cloud. With the Kyndryl Skytap solution, the company was able to migrate this legacy IBM AIX solution without needing to re-write or re-factor decades-old code.

The first step was a successful proof-of-concept project to test secure connectivity between the company’s on-premises environment and the cloud. The Kyndryl Skytap Professional Services team then helped the CPG company achieve a seamless go-live over a single weekend, with no disruption to production workloads.

What progress looks like

The CPG company was able to migrate its legacy billing and distribution application to Kyndryl Skytap on Azure without modification, increasing scalability and availability while reducing costs. The company’s CIO says: “This migration gives us a modern, high-performance, long-term environment as well as helping to reduce our overall IT costs. It will also provide users and customers with a more stable experience for years to come.”

Benefits for the CPG company include:

  • >$1M reduction in data center hardware and managed services costs
  • Improved application performance and uptime
  • Faster and easier IBM AIX upgrades
  • Enhanced disaster recovery capabilities

Kyndryl Skytap on Azure has continued to show the benefits of the cloud beyond the company’s initial migration. The CPG company was recently involved in a merger post production deployment to Kyndryl Skytap. Kyndryl Skytap provided them with the ability to quickly scale and double their existing environment to easily accommodate expanding business requirements post-merger.

What’s your next digital business challenge? Let’s tackle it together.

Meet the team

Ty Hoffman

Associate Director, Customer Partner
Kyndryl Skytap

Abhishek Jain

Senior Lead, Customer Technology Advisor
Kyndryl Skytap

Mark St Martin

Senior Lead, Technical Resolution
Kyndryl Skytap

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