Mammoth cloud transition under tense timeline

Macquarie Telecom has helped renewable packaging company Opal Group with an urgent cloud transition, following advice from the previous provider that support of the company’s storage network would be discontinued.

Headquartered in Melbourne, The Opal Group, owned by Nippon Paper Group, has more than 4500 staff and 80 sites across Australia and New Zealand. The company specialises in sustainable fibre packaging and paper solutions, and exports Australian-made products to 70 countries across the world. The current business was born out of a $1.72 billion merger.

Opal was advised that part of the business had previously suffered from major outage issues with its data centre provider. It further identified a substandard storage area network (SAN) and disaster recovery (DR) posture, which, left unattended, risked its ability to manufacture and deliver products to customers. Clients include some of Australia’s largest retail and FMCG companies, which rely on Opal to provide essential goods and services to often lockdown-stricken communities. The company had targeted this for early replacement but was faced with a post-acquisition issue around the late advice on storage support.

“We essentially had three months to tender, prepare and contract, and three months to transition over the Christmas period,” said Phil Boon, Chief Information Officer, Opal Group.

“This was petabytes of data, 85 virtual machines, and it was all tied to our 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. 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,” he said.

The Macquarie and Azure team worked closely with Boon’s team, as well as manufacturing technology partner Realtek, which helped manage SAP applications to successfully transition services and workloads into Macquarie’s cloud environment. This was stored within its sovereign Data Centre Campus, and delivered on time and on budget.

Azure Expert roadmap access

Buoyed by the successful transition and much-improved cloud environment, Opal is now looking at how it can leverage Macquarie and Azure’s ecosystem to focus more on applications and how they can improve their business processes. This has timed perfectly with Macquarie’s recent Azure Expert MSP status, which gives customers like Opal greater access to Azure’s roadmap.

“The Macquarie and Microsoft partnership was already a huge drawcard,” Boon said.

“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.”

Macquarie is among just over 100 partners across the world that hold this accreditation, becoming the fastest company in Australia to achieve it relative to business inception. The credential required a huge four-month effort of more than 1000 hours from 40 members of Macquarie’s team across its Cloud Services, Telecom, Data Centres and Government divisions.

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