Boosting agility for improved performance

Emerald Performance Materials offers a wide spectrum of material solutions that bring value and performance to consumer and industrial products. With over 500 employees at eight locations around the world, Emerald manufactures and delivers products that include aroma chemicals, antimicrobials, synthesis intermediates, rubber antioxidants and accelerators, as well as non-phthalate, low-VOC plasticizers, modifiers, and coalescents.

Emerald Performance Materials was running its portfolio of around 40 applications on a private hosted cloud, managed by Fujitsu. It wanted to find a more flexible alternative as Fujitsu’s private cloud offering was reaching end of life. The company decided to migrate its core business applications, including iSeries ERP, to a new cloud environment.

The challenge was to transition 40+ VMs and multiple databases without disrupting the day-to-day operations of the business. Fujitsu managed the transition from the outset with the aim of building a futureproof platform with the ability to scale up and down according to demand.

“We needed flexibility and agility in managing the cloud environment so we could improve services and our ability to deliver them,” explains Chris O’Neil, VP Information Technology, Emerald Performance Materials. “Fujitsu has long been a trusted strategic IT partner and it also has a deep understanding of how to run cloud environments efficiently and cost-effectively, so it was the natural choice for this project.”

FUJITSU Cloud Service Azure delivers commercial flexibility and simplicity and, through the inclusion of essential Fujitsu Hybrid IT orchestration services, it enabled Emerald’s successful turnkey adoption of Microsoft Azure.

Following meticulous planning, Fujitsu designed and configured the Azure infrastructure over the course of six months, then Emerald itself migrated the various applications. Fujitsu worked from the OS and network level upwards to guarantee security, performance, and scalability. The existing platform and the new cloud environment then ran in parallel to ensure a seamless transition without any disruption.

“Fujitsu helped us analyze a number of providers based on our workloads, application stack, and strategic roadmap – from a manageability and cost perspective, Azure came out on top,” continues O’Neil. “As a Certified Service Provider, Fujitsu had the experience to seamlessly migrate core applications and databases (SQL) to the new environment without disrupting the business.”

The new Azure end-to-end, transformational cloud environment delivers enhanced performance at lower costs, with the flexibility to scale up and down according to demand. Fujitsu’s trusted partnership with Microsoft and its deep cloud experience ensured that the cloud modernization project was a success from day one.

Now, Emerald enjoys a flexible, managed cloud platform with guaranteed quality of service. It forms the foundation to enable future growth and agile responses to a changing market, as well as boosting resilience and eliminating the outages that had happened previously.

“We can spin out new servers in minutes and redeploy resources when and where we need them; at the same time, application and database performance has improved making users more productive,” concludes O’Neil. “Fujitsu’s smart planning and management means that we are saving up to $20k per month. Fujitsu is a great partner that understands our business needs and understands Azure.”