Stefanutti Stocks has been able to transform the face of their IT department as an early adopter of the cloud and has managed to face work from home disruptions without missing anything with the migration of their VMware cloud environment from Europe to South Africa
A major listed player in the South African and sub-Saharan African construction market, Stefanutti Stocks employs 7,500 people and earns in billions in annual revenue with projects running from Cape Town to Dubai.
"Our IT group acts like a service provider, or a reseller, providing different services for around 16 companies and 200 to 300 projects at any given point. So, we have to be agile and efficient and ensure access to systems no matter where the construction crew lands,” said Kevin Wilson, general manager, Group IT Services.
In 2015, a long-time user of VMware, Stefanutti migrated to a vCloud Air solution hosted in datacentres in Europe. The move let it port legacy applications without much expense and conduct a virtual lift-and-shift migration into the cloud to deploy more modern cloud services and enable other technology services.
According to Wilson, the pressure was mounting for IT to provide faster application performance but maintain the construction industry's reputation for being gun-shy with technology investment. This led to an investigation into local certified VMware cloud provider partners that would offer the same VMware experience at an improved cost, had the skills to support the company, and provide the flexibility to manage, operate and innovate in its environment. It was at this point it selected VMware Cloud Verified and Principal Partner, Routed.
The complete and certified VMware stack at Routed delivered a more reliable and predictable migration. Stefanutti and Routed the seamless and speedy completion of a lift-and-shift of legacy systems from one cloud environment to another. This included the migration of all the companies "moving parts" and third party applications and software such as Veeam. It was also all up and running by the time the pandemic forced a more remote working model – which Wilson adds had no real impact on access to systems as it was a model the business was already comfortable using.
