Compass Group Spain, S.L.

1296818610

Enlisting a key partner in the journey to cloud

As part of multi-national food services company, Compass Group PLC, Compass Group Spain is a leader in catering and auxiliary services with over 50 years of history in Spain and more than 13,000 employees. Providing local service with global reach, Compass Group Spain brings its passion for healthy food to customers across business and industry, including education, healthcare, and sports and entertainment.

Business challenge

At the country level, Compass Group IT organizations operate autonomously, with their own CIOs leading local strategy for data centers and infrastructure. As Compass Group Spain began to centralize operations for procurement and HR across market sectors to support business transformation initiatives, it needed more agility to support new applications. At the global level, leadership also determined that a common infrastructure was needed across the business.

Transformation

As one of the top ten financial performers in the global organization, Compass Group Spain was among the first to follow the corporate mandate and move from its hosted data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Compass Group Spain had a key advantage, having already built a private cloud in its hosted environment, simplifying the migration to public cloud. Migrating to AWS would provide flexible scalability, a modernized infrastructure, and a path to better disaster recovery.

Results

Migration of 6TB ERP database and 130 virtual machines (VMs) delivered on time with no business disruption

Up to 150% improvement in application performance on modernized AWS infrastructure

Greater agility in developing and supporting new business applications

Solution

Compass Group Spain is a long-time Kyndryl customer with a dedicated Kyndryl team that has more than a decade of experience managing the company’s hosted infrastructure. Over time, the team has acquired a deep understanding of the business processes supported by the organization’s infrastructure systems, which Compass Group Spain did not want to lose with its migration. That deep knowledge, plus expertise with both cloud migrations and AWS operations, makes Kyndryl a trusted partner in Compass Group Spain’s digital transformation.

Executing a seamless, transparent migration to cloud

Compass Group Spain runs its business mainly on three types of systems. The Oracle JD Edwards ERP system with a six terabyte Oracle database is the backbone of the business, handling general accounting, procurement and sales. The HR system handles personnel administration along with a bespoke application that manages personnel requests and a payroll application. The third system is a mix of applications related to operations, including web-based procurement and a menu-planning application built to support new professional services offerings.

In the hosted data center, all these applications ran in a VMware environment, with Kyndryl responsible for managing the hosting infrastructure and the servers from bare metal to database. Migrating the workloads to cloud involved lifting and shifting virtual machines from the private data center to AWS. Although the planning, application preparation and actual migration took place over several months — in part due to a significant interruption from the pandemic — migrating the main ERP system and other business apps for a total of 130 virtual machines (VMs) was planned for and executed in a single weekend.

With help from Kyndryl and two other key partners, Compass Group Spain handled the weekend cutover without disrupting business operations. The entire process was transparent to the people in the field and at local headquarters, as was the later transition of all Oracle databases to the AWS managed relational database service (RDS).

Ongoing operations, disaster recovery and engineering for new applications

Today, Kyndryl manages Compass Group Spain’s infrastructure in AWS from the operating systems and middleware up through the database, and actively optimizes cost and performance to get the most value out of AWS resources. Kyndryl is also designing and implementing a disaster recovery solution across two AWS regions, and architecting infrastructure for new applications in collaboration with Compass Group Spain’s development teams.

AWS infrastructure elasticity eliminates capacity constraints experienced in the previous hosted data center, giving Compass Group Spain room to grow and support ongoing business transformation. Performance has received a boost as well. One process that used to take 20 minutes now completes in just 3 minutes because of the AWS database infrastructure. Disaster recovery is set to deliver 99.99% availability, and instances of the Oracle JD Edwards database can be restored in 20 minutes. Behind this success is the continuity of the Kyndryl relationship with Compass Group Spain as it transformed to the cloud infrastructure that supports the business today.

December 2021

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