Yamaha Motors migrates to Azure, achieving greater performance, reducing failures, and laying the foundations for Industry 4.0

Yamaha motorcycle inside factory with factory workers in safety gear

Global, Aug 9, 2023

Since 1970, when it arrived in Brazil, Yamaha Motor do Brasil has had the philosophy of putting the customer first. As a renowned company in the market and with an operation supported by three pillars – industry, logistics, and finance – the client faced the challenge of modernizing its infrastructure to keep up with the demands of growth, business requirements, digital transformation, and compliance.

In 2019, with e-commerce gaining momentum, the company decided to rethink its strategy to ensure its presence in various channels and enable customer service in physical or online environments. More than that, topics such as agility and a data-driven strategy became increasingly important in the company’s plans. The company, however, knew that to ensure its offer of new digital services to customers and business partners, it needed to reassess its technology framework, making sure that it could support the innovations that were on the way.

The first step was to start an assessment of its IT environment. To support it on this journey, Yamaha Motor hired Logicalis to develop a technological evolution plan. The consulting firm would be in charge of helping it plan and prioritize the cycle of investments in infrastructure for the coming years in the short, medium and long term, considering assessments of evolutionary scenarios and technological solutions.

The assessment project included the following:

  • Complete systemic mapping of the environment to identify gaps, critical aspects, and improvement needs.
  • Mapping of the main business processes impacted by technological changes and understanding the drivers and requirements to be considered in the technological evolution journey.
  • Comparative technical and financial analysis of possible evolution scenarios, considering budget, prioritization and dependency criteria.
  • Development of a technological roadmap to accommodate financial flows for the next 3 years, considering the evolution of the scenario with an infrastructure shared between the group’s companies and segregated logically and safely, shifting from a traditional architecture to a digital architecture integrated with the cloud, with high capacity, scalability and resilience, contemplating an environment that is ready to evolve towards Industry 4.0.

Migration to Azure

The process of understanding the environment showed that the company’s networks and telephony systems were obsolete and that there was a need to update its servers. The company understood there that the acceleration of the journey to the cloud was a necessary step to make its digital transformation projects viable.

Yamaha already had a small cloud structure, but the project was more ambitious, in line with the evolutionary roadmap designed by Logicalis: The idea was to migrate about 40 workloads and create an environment that would be capable of supporting, in the future, various applications, such as the management, BI, and CRM systems. Once the scope was defined, the next step involved a complete study of the solutions available on the market, seeking to identify the one that most suited Yamaha’s demands.

After evaluating competitors, including AWS, Yamaha chose to migrate its environment to Microsoft Azure.

Yamaha also relied on Logicalis to perform the migration in a safe way and with transparency towards users. The project was divided into seven waves, using the agile methodology. Thus, in addition to the change being carried out gradually and without unforeseen events, each step offered a different learning experience for the company’s IT teams, which already started using the system immediately after the end of the migration, in July 2021.

The migration project delivered by Logicalis included:

  • Migration of 41 workloads / servers to the cloud
  • Cloud environment support during migration and after the go-live process
  • 24/7 monitoring
  • Backup
  • Support for the Operating System, middleware, and database
  • Networking, security, and storage support
  • Change, incident and problem management
  • DevOps services
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation
  • PaP connection between the Yamaha office in the city of Presidente Dutra, in the state of Maranhão, with Azure through a dual approach connection (Equinix)

Some of the benefits

The project was robust and highly successful. Today, approximately 55% of Yamaha’s workloads, services and applications, including critical ones, run in the cloud. This has provided the company with the flexibility needed to optimize and simplify its infrastructure. Additionally, the migration to the Azure cloud has enabled Yamaha to:

  • Reduce risks in relation to the on-premises environment, which was more susceptible to downtime caused by external factors;
  • Modernize its digital platforms;
  • Ensure availability and scalability of digital platforms;
  • Reduce infrastructure maintenance and operating costs.

Future plans

Following the roadmap designed for the three-year period, Yamaha continues to advance towards digital transformation. Now, the organization is integrating warehouse systems, WMS, BI and CRM applications into the cloud environment. In the future, it intends to create a customer service platform (SAC) within the platform. The company is also studying the modernization of its applications and the possibility of offering more digital services to its end customers and business partners.

“The migration of our workloads to Azure has allowed us to modernize our platforms, providing the company with more flexibility to optimize and simplify its infrastructure and lower its risks in relation to the on-premises environment, which was susceptible to downtimes caused, for example, by air conditioning failures or power problems.

Yamaha has also ensured the modernization, scalability and availability of its digital platforms, and it is possible to see a decrease in costs in the long term. It was a major win for us, and we continue with big ambitions. We are idealizing new partnerships with Logicalis, one of which is aimed at expanding monitoring to businesses, and not just infrastructure.” 

Manoel Honório Jr., supervisor of the Yamaha Infrastructure team.

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