Macquarie Telecom has delivered an urgent transition to the cloud for renewable packaging company Opal Group under a highly limited timeframe.
Headquartered in Melbourne, the Nippon Paper Group-owned Opal Group has more than 4,500 staff and 80 sites across Australia and New Zealand. The current business, born out of a $1.72 billion merger, currently exports to more than 70 countries.
Opal was advised that part of the business had previously suffered from major outage issues with its data centre provider, and further identified a substandard storage area network (SAN) and disaster recovery (DR) posture.
“We essentially had three months to tender, prepare and contract, and three months to transition over the Christmas period,” said Opal Group chief information officer Phil Boon.
“This was petabytes of data, 85 virtual machines, and it was all tied to our most critical workloads including SAP financial systems and operational applications.
“We reviewed options from a range of providers tied to each major cloud player, and the Macquarie and Azure combination stood out. We had confidence in their partnership and the dual accountability that came with it, their sensible proposal, commercial flexibility, and – most importantly – confidence in their ability to get the job done under a tight deadline.”
The Macquarie and Azure teams worked with Boon’s team and manufacturing technology partner Realtek which helped manage SAP applications, to transition services and workloads into Macquarie’s cloud environment.
This was stored within its sovereign Data Centre Campus, and delivered on time and on budget.
Opal is now looking at how it can leverage Macquarie and Azure’s ecosystem to focus more on applications and improving business processes.
“The Macquarie and Microsoft partnership was already a huge drawcard,” added Boon.
“Now it’s like we’ve got a direct line to Azure, to the very coders putting together the next generation of services. It’s clear this is going to have a hugely positive impact on our business as we continue to grow.”
Macquarie is among just over 100 partners across the world that hold the Azure Expert MSP status, which took more than 1,000 hours over four months from 40 members of Macquarie’s team.
“We go all-in with the partners that can bring the biggest benefits to our customers, and it would be hard to find a better example of that anywhere in the world than Macquarie and Microsoft,” said Macquarie Telecom group executive Luke Clifton,
“This is about trust, collaboration, and giving great service to companies left out in the cold by providers more interested in underservicing and overcharging. We are trusted by companies like Microsoft and great customers across Australia because we subscribe to the very opposite.” Got a news tip for our journalists? Share it with us anonymously here.