SoftwareOne case study

Corex migrates SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure for improved scalability and performance

Learn how Corex worked with SoftwareOne to plan and execute a migration of its SAP solution from an on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure as its hardware faced end of life.

Corex is a manufacturer of cardboard packaging products. Based in Aalst, Belgium, the company is a division of the global packaging group VPK. Corex employs more than 1,300 people and operates 32 locations across Europe and Asia.

Like many manufacturers, Corex uses SAP to manage its operations. The company’s SAP solution was running on-premises in a Berlin data centre and a colocation centre provided by its network provider. However, the hardware that its infrastructure was using was reaching end of life and support could not be extended any further than its current contract.

Corex faced a decision: commission new hardware, support and hosting arrangements or migrate to the cloud. The company chose the latter and turned to SoftwareOne, its technical partner since 2017, for guidance and strategic support.

In addition to a seamless migration to Microsoft Azure for its SAP operations, the company wanted to benefit from the scalability and flexibility the cloud offers and to improve redundancy and business continuity arrangements.

Zero
unplanned downtime
Seamless migration
with no disruption to SAP business activity
Complete visibility
of infrastructure and network operations

Client: Corex
Industry: Manufacturing
Platform: Azure Cloud
Services: Cloud Migration Services, Cloud Managed Services
Country: United Kingdom

Building the case for a cloud-based future

VPK acquired Corenso, another cardboard manufacturer, in 2019 and that acquisition merged with Corex. The joint organisation follows VPK’s lead on IT strategy while retaining autonomy over its choice of technical partners. Like many manufacturers, Corex wanted to retain its hardware for as long as possible and had bought time for its decision with extended hardware support.

Corex has always been a Microsoft house, and with so many Microsoft services already in use, migrating to Azure was its first choice. VPK had also chosen Azure for its own migration, so having the same platform strategy as the group made sense.

SoftwareOne worked with Corex on the business case for the migration and on the migration plan. A major goal for the project was a smooth, seamless migration. Corex has over 400 SAP users, so disruptions had to be avoided. The company also wanted to gain better control over its costs – something that moving from a capex to an opex model would provide.

In addition to an infrastructure that could scale easily and offer high levels of flexibility, the company also needed to improve the redundancy and resiliency of its systems. The IT team wanted a more robust business continuity capability and regular backups in place in case of failover.

SoftwareOne developed three costed infrastructure options for Corex, from a basic level to an enterprise level. The two companies assessed the design options for 4–6 months, looking at different models and services.

Worker in a hard hat holding cartons in his hands

Detailed migration planning and refactoring key services

The plan needed to minimise business interruptions and allow Corex to quickly unlock the critical cloud capabilities it wanted around flexibility and scalability. Corex and SoftwareOne tested the migration plan on the company’s three different environments, learning lessons during each stage and applying them to the next migration. By the time they were ready to go live, the team had built a high level of confidence in their plan.

Although it was primarily a lift-and-shift migration, the team discovered through testing that some elements of the infrastructure needed to be refactored for better operation on Azure. There was some concern over the scarcity of the reserved instances servers commonly used for SAP. SoftwareOne’s solution was to move from one SAP application server to two, in different availability zones. The result was a more resilient service with better availability.

With testing and refactoring complete, the migration to production began on a Friday evening. The team was delighted with how smoothly it ran – a success attributed to the detailed planning phase. Because SoftwareOne had been working with Corex since 2017, both companies’ teams knew each other well and some functional support for the SAP configuration team was already subcontracted to SoftwareOne. The familiarity with the system and its quirks and how Corex employees interfaced with it helped make the process smooth and painless.

We already had faith in SoftwareOne’s ability to support SAP because they've been doing that for years. It was their deep knowledge around Azure that was such a massive help on the project. Their ability to advise the wider group on Azure topics earned them respect from the senior leadership team.

Gavin McKay

Group IT Manager at Corex

Microsoft Azure at SoftwareOne
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Smooth migration enables zero unplanned downtime

The seamless migration was achieved and the vast majority of the 400 SAP users didn’t notice anything had changed. The Corex team could see the system was load balanced correctly across the two application servers.

The migration to Azure has made many essential maintenance operations more straightforward, with multiple platform patches and upgrades applied by Microsoft’s engineers. Now that it is running two application servers, Corex can take one server down to apply an update and not disrupt service. Previously, this work would have had to be completed out of business hours. Since the migration, Corex has experienced zero unplanned downtime and the IT team now has much better levels of visibility of system performance and costs.

On Azure, we have a better service and better performance all around. We have a more resilient network and can actually view the usage because we've migrated it to a modern platform.

Gavin McKay

Group IT Manager at Corex

From the start, the relationship between Corex and SoftwareOne was collaborative. In addition to SoftwareOne’s familiarity with its systems and its operations, Corex appreciated the depth of the team’s Azure expertise. That expertise even helped the VPK group overcome two issues with its own migration when SoftwareOne moved quickly to resolve the issues holding up VPK.

Corex has signed up to a three-year SoftwareOne Azure Managed Service agreement. Now that Corex has a finely tuned infrastructure, Corex and SoftwareOne are planning an upgrade to SAP S/4HANA. That will give the company access to better analytics, the SAP Business Technology Platform and the Fiori interface to improve the user experience for its SAP users.