Ixom transitions to Microsoft Azure cloud platform to enable digital transformation

With more than 1,200 employees globally, Ixom is the market leader in water treatment and chemical distribution in Australia and New Zealand. The company 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.

Challenge

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. It 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.

Solution

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

Results

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.

Through the shift to Microsoft Azure, Ixom now enjoys greater business agility, the flexibility to shift capital expenditures to operational costs, and the ability to optimise IT services and reduce operational costs.

“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 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 Connect and Microsoft...” Rowan Start, Head of IT, Ixom.