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Challenge.
For the renowned international shoe manufacturer, Scholl Shoes, 100 years of expertise means the perfect combination of comfort, technology and fashion. As a pioneer in the field of high-quality shoe fashion, design and innovation, Scholl Shoes is active around the world. The portfolio of shoes with unique comfort and tried-and-tested technologies is put together in Milan, but the designers, technicians and employees at all locations need to be able to communicate as seamlessly as possible. To connect each workshop even more efficiently, Scholl Shoes were looking to further digitalise and automate its processes. To this end, It should be migrated to the cloud without impacting the core business, increasing latencies or causing downtime.
We are extremely happy with the results of this first project. Together with our partners Microsoft and VMware and their technologies, Bechtle massively accelerated and simplified our first step into the cloud. Now we are in a situation in which we can tackle the next level of our digital transformation. We are already planning next steps and want to gain some insight into big data and transform our SAP landscape into a cloud-native scenario with Bechtle by our side.
Tobias Klaiber, CEO, Scholl Shoes
Solution.
The challenge was expertly tackled by Bechtle’s specialists. After joint discussions with Scholl Shoes on the goals of the cloud migration, a vision was defined and a roadmap created for the restructuring of the data centre.
The first step was for Bechtle to analyse the existing IT environment before the specialists planned the perfect solution including the requested cloud transformation and fully managed IT environment. Previously, Scholl Shoes used VMware to virtualise its existing SAP environment, and so a VMware environment was also be used in the cloud. Bechtle worked with Scholl Shoes before opting for an up-to-date Microsoft Azure VMware Solution (AVS) as a native VMware environment in which the existing virtual environments could be migrated.
As an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP), Bechtle counts as one of the strongest Microsoft partners in the world when it comes to planning, migrating and operating cloud services on the Azure platform. The AVS private cloud environment can be accessed from local and Azure-based resources. With its VMware Master Services Competencies, Bechtle were able to migrate the shoe manufacturer’s workloads from the locations’ local environments and deploy existing virtual machines without any downtime. It was therefore necessary to send firewalls to the individual locations where they linked up under instruction from Bechtle. Azure Express Route was then used to connect the sites.
From planning and preparation to implementation, the entire process took just five months. In this time, Bechtle became a strategic partner for Scholl Shoes, implementing the migration into the new infrastructure with Microsoft and VMware and operating the entire IT from a single source. Bechtle also extensively modernised Scholl Shoes’ data centre platform, but the company still uses the technologies they are already familiar with including their capabilities, tools and governance models. The existing network topologies were also retained so that the employees around the world didn’t have to be retrained. Migration took place during ongoing operations without any downtime when the workloads were moved into the Azure VMware Solution.
Business benefits.
Today, Scholl Shoes gets its entire IT from Bechtle as a Managed Service and no longer has to worry about updates or platform configuration. The virtualised IT environment that has been migrated into the cloud runs stably, is powerful and can be flexibly scaled. Many business processes were digitalised and automated with the future-facing virtual AVS environment. This not only saves time and money, but Scholl Shoes’ IT can now concentrate on the core business while Bechtle keeps an eye on the technology and its costs.