Reference
Data center transformation - for greater competitiveness at lower costs
Cost efficiency, flexibility and satisfied users at the touch of a button at the Pütz Group
The history of the Pütz Group began in 1988, when Stefan Pütz founded his own planning office in Saarburg, Rhineland-Palatinate. Initially specializing in automation software for production systems and their commissioning, ten years later the company was no longer just building control cabinets, but also complete systems including mechanical equipment and robotics. The joy of new ideas and the pursuit of high quality became the driving force behind the successive takeover and continuation of various mechanical engineering companies. Thanks to their specific technological and industry expertise, the range of products and services has been steadily expanded. The Pütz Group now comprises eleven mechanical and plant engineering companies with over 120 employees at nine locations, including one in Slovakia. www.puetzgroup.de
Added value for the customer
Management Summary
Increasing globalization and growing competition are forcing companies to cut costs and adapt their business strategies. Large companies from all sectors are already increasingly using services from the cloud in order to be able to act even more flexibly. This technological progress also offers smaller or medium-sized organizations new opportunities in the business environment, the benefits of which affect all areas. With the "Data Center Transformation by IT-HAUS", customers are gradually saying goodbye to cost-intensive hardware budgets and improving performance with less administrative effort. Customers can choose from a range of cloud solutions, from public to on-premises models. In order to optimally support the group's rapid growth and maintain maximum flexibility, the machine manufacturer Pütz Group has moved its applications and virtual workstations to the cloud based on Citrix. The Pütz Group is thus driving forward its digital transformation and making significant cost savings by only paying for what it actually uses. The customer now benefits from a cost-efficient system that grows flexibly with them
"Not only has the management of the entire environment become much easier, our users are also satisfied because they are always working with the latest version and the systems have become much faster. In some cases, the performance of the applications is even better than with the local installation! Our VPN is stable and runs without any problems. And the best thing is: thanks to the unlimited upward scalability, we can grow quickly and meet the requirements of the market."
Starting position
The Pütz Group is characterized by the seamless interaction of its subsidiaries. Although each company develops its products independently, purchasing, human resources, marketing and controlling are managed centrally at the headquarters. The resulting synergy effects enable the company to offer its own customers comprehensive, high-quality solutions - even beyond the individual companies' areas of expertise. Industry 4.0 and its own quality standards are driving the Pütz Group to constantly expand its range of services and further develop existing capacities. The steady growth of the company has also led to increasingly complex IT infrastructure requirements. Until now, the individual subsidiaries of the Pütz Group have each operated their own small but highly professional data centers with virtualized server environments, storage and backup in order to provide central services such as Active Directory, Exchange and ERP systems for users. These systems were replaced every three to four years, which regularly meant a considerable investment volume for the group in addition to high operating costs. In addition, the support and administration of the decentralized IT infrastructure at the various locations was time-consuming. As a result, consideration was finally given to using cloud services for upcoming investments in new hardware - including a cloud-only solution if possible. In a joint planning workshop, IT-HAUS and the Pütz Group determined the customer's specific requirements and defined the objectives based on their approach.
Requirements
After examining the IT infrastructure of the entire group and the software used in the company (email, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Sage and Citrix), the cloud experts at IT-HAUS recommended that the customer work with a central Active Directory domain for all companies in future and combine all cloud functionalities in a so-called tenant - an administration account that bundles all cloud services and provides the central directory service Azure AD. This would save costs and administration effort and offer all users the best possible integration into company-wide IT structures.
Goals
In addition to minimizing local hardware, the aim was to provide applications such as the ERP software Sage, the document management system, file server and Citrix terminal server via the Microsoft Azure platform. In this way, the parallel setup of comparable IT structures at other locations could be avoided and the associated costs saved. This should be realized with virtual machines, possibly SQL as a cloud service and a Citrix environment in Azure.
Solution
Once the workshop was complete, IT-HAUS went about setting up the entire infrastructure in the cloud in the form of a proof of concept based on a new domain at the Saarburg site. All users at this location now use Office 365 as the standard application from the cloud, which replaces the previous Exchange, SharePoint and Skype applications. The Sage and Citrix environment was installed on virtual machines in the cloud and configured in such a way that the company can completely dispense with local server hardware. The IT server infrastructure of the entire group can gradually be migrated to the cloud. If corresponding hardware updates are also due in the future for connected parts of the company, these servers will now be moved to the cloud and additional users integrated into the new environment.
Advantages
For the administrator, the switch to the cloud primarily means a considerable reduction in workload: they no longer have to install hardware updates or software patches for their server environment and the regular replacement of backup tapes is also a thing of the past. New updates and security patches for the Microsoft 365 cloud services are applied globally by Microsoft so that they are automatically available to all customers. This means that administrators and users always work with the latest technologies. Internal IT can devote more time to applications that directly support production. Frequently performed tasks such as adding or deleting users in Azure Active Directory are accelerated, as the migration to the cloud also merges the various Active Directories of the corporate group. In just a few steps, a new employee can be assigned a complete workstation with all the required - user-related - applications. These optimized processes pave the way for the growth of the entire group of companies.
Benefit
By moving to the cloud, the entire group of companies is benefiting from considerable cost savings:
- through a simplified license model: installation on a central system instead of many different servers and consolidation of Sage licenses
- through reduction of local hardware
- through reduction of administrative effort
- through lower operating costs
Transparent costs are ensured by a simple billing model with monthly collective invoices and a price per user, the number of which can be adjusted daily. Depending on the number of users, the costs can be easily allocated to the individual company locations. In the next step, IT-HAUS would like to support the customer in identifying further savings potential with regard to resources that are not required at night or at the weekend, for example.
Software
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