High-availability IT at predictable costs

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High-Availability IT at Predictable Costs

Swarco AG

About SWARCO AG

SWARCO AG, based in Wattens in Austria’s Tyrol region, is the world’s largest manufacturer of traffic signals and the second largest producer of reflective glass beads. With their decades of experience, the German companies in the SWARCO Group cover the full spectrum of products, solutions, and services for traffic safety and traffic management. Reflective glass beads, road markings, traffic signs, corporate design solutions, and environmentally friendly turnkey systems for urban and inter-urban traffic management, parking, detection, and electro-mobility make SWARCO a one-stop-shop for all transportation engineering needs.

The task at hand

SWARCO AG in Austria sought a strategic partner for the support of its SAP® systems, to keep its IT costs at a manageable level. The servers, infrastructure, and core operations, along with the associated projects like upgrades and migrations, were to be completely outsourced. It was particularly important to SWARCO to have a high-availability, state-of-the-art data center.

The solution

As far back as 2008, SWARCO AG commissioned Scheer GmbH to support the company’s SAP systems. Scheer accepted this task and transferred all the systems to its data center in Freiburg. Good customer support, clearly defined responsibilities, the professional handling of SWARCO’s requirements, and the high-performance data center won the Austrian company over. In mid-2022, the systems were successfully transferred to the MS Azure Cloud, where they will continue to be supported by the proven Scheer team. Swarco thus benefits from state-of-the-art technology at reduced costs, maximum flexibility and scalability, and future-proof options for operational and process improvements.

The result

Cost reduction through flat-rate billing
Modern security and backup strategies
High-performance data center
Scalable services and infrastructure
Ongoing adaptation based on the latest technological progress

Further education and training expenses are borne by the service partner
No dedicated staff needed at SWARCO
Constant availability of competent contact persons
Direct lines of communication through dedicated contact persons

Hans Simeaner
CIO | SWARCO AG, Österreich

"The excellent customer support, clearly defined responsibilities, and professional handling of our requirements never cease to amaze us."

Efficient alternative

SWARCO AG is the umbrella organization of the SWARCO Group and it holds shares in more than 80 companies in 20 countries. Based in Wattens, Tyrol, the company directs the strategic orientation of the SWARCO Group and provides the central administration functions. Until 2008, the applications required to run the company were controlled, managed, and maintained at an internal data center. The applications grew increasingly complex, however, until the performance of the hardware no longer met the needs of the software. The IT structure demanded massive investments in data center and staff, to keep the systems and the system landscape efficient and at the state of the art. The sum of these investments proved to be economically unacceptable. Furthermore, SWARCO preferred to concentrate more on expanding its core competencies. In this context, the company sought an efficient alternative and decided to outsource support for the IT infrastructure to Scheer GmbH in Freiburg.

Long-standing cooperation

With its operations portfolio, Scheer has supported the traffic expert’s systems since 2008. After SWARCO made its decision, the first step involved migrating the systems to Scheer’s modern data center. In mid-2022, the systems were successfully transferred to the MS Azure Cloud, where they will continue to be supported by the proven Scheer team. Swarco thus benefits from state-of-the-art technology at reduced costs, maximum flexibility and scalability, and future-proof options for operational and process improvements. SWARCO is supported by dedicated contact persons in service management and the SAP Basis team. This creates mutual trust and guarantees a successful, efficient partnership. The experienced managed services and IT specialists know their way around the requirements perfectly and SWARCO can rely on up-to-date, professionally grounded solutions. Scheer also provides MS Azure offers maximum flexibility and is able to respond to short-term and temporary requirements, enabling the hosting of temporally limited project systems and temporary systems.

Operations

With 24/7 availability, SWARCO benefits from full-service operations with sophisticated backup solutions and failsafe performance, to guarantee smooth operations. The deployed technology is always state of the art and visualization also enables short-term additional needs to be met. Today, SWARCO has optimal cost control: The IT costs are transparent and the cost structures can be planned. With IT experts who are continually trained in the latest technologies, Scheer also supports new operating solutions
at SWARCO. The team from Freiburg successfully executed the “Upgrade to SAP ECC 6.0” project for both SWARCO and its subsidiary SWARCO Traffic Systems, performing the entire technical part of the upgrade and Unicode migration. The many years of positive cooperation and the good experience in hosting were reason enough to also hand over the SAP systems of the subsidiary SWARCO Traffic Systems (formerly Signalbau Huber) to Scheer.