Accenture is helping one of South Africa’s leading coal producers, Exxaro, digitally transform its business and unlock new revenue streams by managing the migration of its SAP solutions, and other centrally-run applications, to Microsoft Azure.
The company says the collaboration supports Exxaro’s ambition to establish a secure, agile, cost-effective and scalable platform that will improve business processes and continuity.
Accenture created a cloud transformation strategy for Exxaro that defined the business case for migration to a public cloud, a move which offered the lowest total cost of ownership, improvements to core systems resiliency, and the agility needed to meet customer demands.
In line with Exxaro’s requirement for a swift and secure transition, Accenture designed and built a cloud platform in the South African Azure data centres. This included optimising Exxaro’s SAP systems to take advantage of cloud architecture benefits and building a more resilient and available architecture to improve business continuity. Accenture then seamlessly migrated Exxaro’s enterprise applications, which included more than 280 Microsoft Windows virtual machines, on to Azure with minimal disruption, while also integrating multiple remote mining locations in South Africa.
Accenture will run, secure and continually optimise Exxaro’s cloud environment in collaboration with its cloud management organisation. This will provide resource visibility, management consistency, and operational control for cloud optimisation and scale, amid changing business needs.
“Accenture’s deep expertise in leading on SAP and other application migrations to Microsoft Azure means that Exxaro will benefit from a more secure, scalable and agile operating environment that is more cost-effective than standing up a new on-premises data centre,” says Desmond Govender, group manager, Information Management, Exxaro. “This will improve business processes and continuity, as well as free up resources to focus on achieving superior business outcomes.”
Pradeep Roy, cloud advisory lead for Accenture in Africa, adds: “Exxaro’s decision to move to the cloud puts them in a strong position for greater efficiency and innovation. This approach to transformation will deliver a competitive advantage on a secure cloud platform, enabling them to flex based on business demand and accelerate innovation.”