Case study: Frucor moves into Fujitsu's cloud

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 22 February 2012 11:58

New Zealand-based beverage manufacturer Frucor (the company behind brands such as V and Just Juice) successfully moved its SAP environment into the cloud, but learned a few things in the process.

Frucor, a $500,000,000 business with 900 employees, used to run its SAP ERP system on a mix of AIX and Windows servers located at a hosting provider's premises, explained Paul Miller, the company's head of IT.

But the servers were due for replacement, and he faced budget issues, unpredictable future workloads due to rapid and uneven growth. Mr Miller also wanted to avoid technology lock-in, and to spend more time delivering business value and less on 'keeping the lights on'.

Furthermore, he was tired of buying hardware years in advance of actually needing it. "It's just a yesteryear model," he observed.

So he turned to the idea of running the applications on a cloud provider's platform instead.

It was important to start by accurately determining all the current costs, he said, in order to provide a true comparison.

He also worked closely with a specialist from SAP to determine an appropriate hosting model and software stack, after determining that the company would stick with the current ERP system. The review settled on a hypervisor, operating system and database.

Page 2: How the project progressed.