Visy is going full tilt into the public cloud with the packaging giant moving a majority of its workloads into Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, with the help of its long-term technology partner Telstra.
Visy was Telstra’s first ever cloud customer and the company’s chief information officer David Peano said that the move to AWS was the latest evolution of a journey that started in 2009.
“Over the course of our cloud journey we have realised that the value is not in owning the technology outright,” he told The Australian.
Instead, according to Mr Peano, his focus has been to ensure that Visy was ready to use the trends at hand and derive maximum business value from them.
Visy has already moved more than 60 applications to AWS in a record time of two months and is now gearing up for the significant challenge of migrating its SAP BW on HANA and SAP systems environment.
“The value of moving into AWS does outweigh the risks of owning it ourselves,” Mr Peano said.
For a business with a global footprint, the AWS move should help Visy simplify and strengthen a number of its core IT functions and more importantly, according to Mr Peano, the business can now cut the time worrying about infrastructure and focus on new business initiatives and product innovation.
“Visy wasn’t born digital and we have had to deal with legacy but we have shown that digital migrants can still do cloud well,” he said.
“It comes down how you redefine the things you have been doing well for some time.”
AWS is by no means the only game in town when it comes to the public cloud, with Microsoft’s Azure and Google, along with a number of smaller operators, running the race.
“You can shop around and there are options out there but at the end of the day you have to understand what works for you,” Mr Peano said.
Helping businesses make the right call is the sweet spot for Telstra to leverage the strengths of its programmable network with the head of the telco’s enterprise services business, Martijn Blanken, saying that the decision to recommend AWS to Visy was made after a period of substantial consultation.
“We are completely agnostic so the process is very consultative and collaborative,” he said.
“Some businesses are better equipped than other when it comes to how much guidance they need and we understand that.”
Once a decision is made Telstra pretty much does all of the heavy lifting from there, Mr Blanken added.
“We do the architecture, the design implementation and the project management.”
Visy has made considerable strides in its cloud initiative but Mr Peano said that once the AWS move is completed it will provide a platform for the company to explore how it can use emerging trends like data analytics, machine learning and IoT to its advantage.
“The cloud, the way I see it, is now a commodity like any utility,” he said.
“It’s about how you use the capabilities at hand, can we use the trends to optimise our facilities, use the data that’s produced there to drive operational efficiencies.”
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