Building an integrated and scalable cloud infrastructure.

When Italian cable systems company Prysmian and US-based General Cable joined forces in 2017, Prysmian achieved a true global footprint, with operations in 50 countries. It also gained a new IT infrastructure and a whole new set of challenges.

For example, General Cable’s IT application environment was very fragmented and less mature than Prysmian’s. Prysmian had a single SAP ERP instance; General Cable had over a dozen ERP systems, and only one was SAP.

Integrating the IT environments was a top priority, and we wanted an infrastructure that would fuel innovation and business transformation.

A scalable cloud infrastructure

Our goal was to have both Prysmian and General Cable running on the same system—SAP S/4HANA—and operating as a single company. We also wanted to speak the same business language, reduce costs, and share best practices, so we embarked on a comprehensive integration program.

We needed to support SAP system-based workloads coming in from General Cable in the US, as well as host an organic growth of instances for future projects. General Cable workloads would need to be integrated with our existing IT infrastructure, which is managed by IBM Services under a strategic outsourcing contract.

As a pilot program, we decided to harmonize the General Cable data warehouse and other systems and to move forward with global cloud-based SAP implementation.

We investigated several cloud providers and ultimately extended our current strategic outsourcing contract with IBM for an additional 12 months.

The result was a new strategic IT environment on IBM Cloud. We have deployed a range of SAP technologies running in an IBM Cloud for VMware virtualized solution hosted on SAP-certified IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers. The designated operating system for SAP HANA appliances is Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions.

Ready for the future and cutting costs

Our new environment is designed to be modular and scalable, so it will support new SAP solutions as Prysmian grows. The work is a milestone in our journey to the cloud. We believe that cloud architecture is the foundation for any digital strategy and, one day, it will be 100% cloud.

Ultimately, we anticipate reducing our total cost of infrastructure by 20%.

To learn more, read the case study.