With more than 1,200 employees globally, Ixom is the market leader in water treatment and chemical distribution in Australia and New Zealand, with a growing presence in Asia, Latin America and North America.
Ixom has a proud and long history of supplying chemicals across a diverse range of markets including agriculture, building and construction, food and beverage, mining, pharmaceutical and personal care, plastics, pulp and paper and water treatment industries. Whether it is the fresh and clean water you drink, the many domestic products you use, the foods you eat — Ixom is part of every household in one way or another.
“The transformation of our IT architecture to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform has far exceeded my expectations. We have put all our eggs in one basket and it’s great to say that it has been completely reliable and has allowed us to react quickly to business demands in ways we just couldn’t have done before.”
Rowan Start Head of IT, Ixom
Business needs
Ixom were looking for a strategic business technology partner with the capability, technical expertise and experience to successfully refresh its IT platforms and to design, deploy and transition to a new hybrid cloud infrastructure within a fixed 12-month period.
The target state needed to establish a robust, technical architecture that balanced automation, optimisation, flexibility, agility and cost. A key focus of the transition was to transform the infrastructure environment from on-premise legacy systems to the cloud and in doing so, enable Ixom to increase organisational agility to deliver the required business functionality as well as reduce costs.
Of critical importance, the programme was to ensure no material disruption to its dispersed business operations during the transition.
Given the scale of the transition program, a number of challenges had to be addressed to ensure continuity of operations and an ability to meet the 12-month transition window, including:
- Separation of data and migration of on-premise applications to cloud (a combination of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS)
- Migration of on-premise SAP AIX/DB2 (VMware Esx) to Azure SAP Windows/ SQL (Hyper-V)
- Right-sizing Run services via continuous optimisation of consumption-based cloud services provided through Microsoft Azure
- Continuation of BAU support throughout the transition
- Designing and managing solution implementation across a diverse geographical footprint
- Ensuring security and compliance requirements are met during and after migration
“We couldn’t have done it without Microsoft and DXC Connect working in close partnership. The leadership and quality of work displayed was first class, and we are now reaping the rewards. A big thank you to DXC Connect and Microsoft.”
Rowan Start Head of IT, Ixom
Building on best practices
The solution included the following services delivered by DXC Connect:
- Microsoft Azure services across Australia (Sydney, Melbourne) and USA (Ashburn) servicing Ixom’s global footprint covering Australia/NZ, Asia, USA and LATAM
- Hybrid-Cloud DMZ utilising on-premise firewall together with Azure ExpressRoute
- Integration of BT MPLS Private Cloud with Azure Public Cloud
- Azure Backup services integrated with on-premise Commvault services
- SAP on Azure Windows/SQL
- ADFS integration with zScaler for O365 SSO
The result
Ixom achieved its goal of refreshing its IT platforms and transitioning to Microsoft Azure cloud services within 12 months with minimal disruptions to business operations. The adoption of Microsoft Azure allowed Ixom to avoid the need to establish new data centres and the associated capital investment.
Benefits
Through the shift to Microsoft Azure, Ixom enjoys the following benefits:
- Greater business agility
- Immediate access to computing resources and applications
- Fast time to market/quicker time to value through significantly reduced time to provision equipment and services
- Flexibility to shift capital expenditures to operational costs
- Ability to optimise IT services and reduce operational costs
- Paying for only the compute, storage, and network resources that application workloads actually use on an hourly basis
- Scaling back under-utilised systems during non-peak periods
- Saving money by quickly provisioning temporary VM instances (eg for training, testing etc), and then deleting them when they are no longer required
According to Rowan Start, Head of IT, Ixom: “The transformation of our IT architecture to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform has far exceeded my expectations. We have put all our eggs in one basket and it’s great to say that it has been completely reliable and has allowed us to react quickly to business demands in ways we just couldn’t have done before. We couldn’t have done it without Microsoft and DXC Connect working in close partnership. The leadership and quality of work displayed was first class, and we are now reaping the rewards. A big thank you to DXC Connect and Microsoft.”