BAUMANN goes Azure

BAUMANN has been a family-owned company with Swiss roots for 140 years, evolving from a manufacturer of wooden articles into an internationally active specialist for springs, stamped and bent parts. Today, the group manufactures at nine production sites in eight countries, primarily for applications in the automotive and industrial sectors. As the company expanded internationally, its IT landscape evolved along with it, and each site built up its infrastructure according to local requirements. Every plant has its own server room, every plant runs largely the same services, and every plant keeps its data locally. With growing internationalization came the opportunity to unify the already centrally organized Group IT on the infrastructure and data level as well.

Elmar Iten, Head of Group IT at BAUMANN, had named this tension long before the actual migration project. The strategic arguments for centralization were obvious: group-wide, central data availability, higher security, and less dependency on the physical security of individual sites. Then there was the question of staffing. A lean, long-established Group IT team that knows its own applications in detail brings real substance, and cloud depth as an additional discipline grows in parallel with the migration project, supported by training and a change management process that continues well beyond the first go-live.

While BAUMANN was conducting a systematic inventory of its existing landscape, Broadcom, as the new owner of VMware, announced substantial price increases for virtualization licenses. The Infrastructure & Database Migration Assessment, originally intended as the basis for an unhurried consolidation, delivered exactly the material that mattered at that moment: around 200 servers, mostly running on VMware, in a mix of Windows and Linux workloads, distributed across the plants worldwide, with the redundant services that a per-plant architecture grown over many years typically produces. A planned consolidation thus became a migration project under time pressure; its priority shifted, but its goal remained unchanged.

The technical basis for this response was already in place. The Azure Foundation on which the central platform is built is not conceived as a one-time setup, but described as Infrastructure as Code, making it a standardized and reproducible pattern. A landing zone maintained in templates and pipelines can be extended without every extension having to be planned as its own architecture project, and it prevents potential misconfigurations caused by administrator "click-ops". When BAUMANN had to respond to the changed VMware licensing situation and needed additional landing zones in global Azure regions at short notice, the concept was defined within a few hours and the implementation followed within two to three days at most. This flexibility, as Iten has noted on several occasions, was for him the real proof that the architecture decision made up front had been the right one.

Iten sees the immediate effects of the migration in two areas that reinforce each other: the agility with which Group IT can respond to changing requirements going forward, and the reduced risk that comes with eliminating local physical dependencies. The central platform decouples IT from the security of individual server rooms, from limited local capacity, and from the question of when each site will next revise its backup concept. A per-plant logic gives way to a central architecture that remains both documentable and regionally adaptable.

What the platform enables beyond that becomes visible in topics that could not have emerged in the old architecture. Among other things, a team within Group IT is experimenting with IoT Hub, working on a field of application whose foundations simply did not exist before the migration project. App zones and new subscriptions can now be provisioned with manageable effort, and the technical prerequisite no longer stands in the way of the actual solution.