Luke Clifton (Macquarie Telecom)
Macquarie Telecom, Microsoft Azure and Realtek have partnered up to carry out an “urgent” cloud transition for Melbourne packaging company Opal Group.
The move came from the advice of its previous provider Fujitsu, which said it would stop supporting the company’s storage network, Macquarie Telecom claimed.
As such, the company, which has more than 4,500 staff and 80 sites across Australia and New Zealand, needed an urgent cloud-based storage network to manufacture and distribute packaging for retail and FMCG companies.
Opal Group’s storage included petabytes of data and 85 virtual machines, which were all tied to its 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,” said Phil Boon, Opal Group CIO. “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 closely with Boon’s team, as well as 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, with Macquarie claiming the project was delivered on time and on budget.
Opal is now looking at how it can use Macquarie and Azures’ ecosystems to focus more on applications and how they can improve their 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.”
The partnership follows Macquarie’s recent attainment of Microsoft’s Azure Expert MSP status, making it one of 100 partners to gain the accreditation.
“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 Luke Clifton, group executive at Macquarie Telecom.
