Synnex helps V Net Solutions move services to the cloud

As the digital economy demands a more modernised approach to IT transformation, many businesses are looking to the cloud for answers.

Cloud migration isn’t easy for most businesses because critical business information and processes are currently running on a broad mix of ageing infrastructure and systems. These complexities are amplified for service providers looking to solve this problem across a range of clients with different challenges and levels of maturity.

This was the reality facing retail inventory specialist, V Net Solutions. The team provides inventory management and retail analytic solutions to some of Australia’s best-known retailers. It helps them handle stock replenishment more efficiently to ensure they’re not sitting on unwanted inventory.

For Robin Carter, BI Systems Analyst at V Net Solutions, the power of data presented an obvious opportunity. 

“We noticed that retailers were generating powerful data through stock and sales figures but often didn’t understand what to do with it. They had rich data but poor insights,” Robin says.

All retailers and their suppliers generate huge volumes of data but consolidating it into actionable insights is often a challenge. A single supplier can have up to 15 retailers offloading data in different formats, languages and styles.

V Net takes these complex streams of information and builds them into a meaningful data model, providing customisable dashboards, scorecards and reports that can easily identify business opportunities.

When V Net developed the platform three years ago, it sought the help of a third party to manage the hosting and development side of the work. At the time it didn’t have the scale to justify owning the entire operation, so opted for a white-label model that outsourced the time-intensive development.

With demand growing, management opted to bring the insights product back in-house. V Net worked with Synnex – a leading IT distributor with a strong track record for supporting cloud migration.

Up in the clouds

With the partnership in place, V Net and Synnex went to work. The initial migration took roughly three months to execute as V Net had to rewrite existing code to account for the massive data ingestion. The platform was built on Microsoft’s innovative product stack, using Power BI for advanced business intelligence.

“The migration saw a significant redesign, moving V Net away from physical hardware in a traditional data centre and transitioning it to a software-as-a-service model,” Robin says. “Our first customer was successfully transferred over in March and we’re now working on moving a second customer. We’ve also added a new customer directly into the new system.”

Synnex played a critical consulting role throughout this journey, helping the V Net team map existing technology to the equivalent Microsoft Azure services. Through regular consultation, they reviewed every component of the new model to ensure it included everything that was needed and nothing that wasn’t. For example, V Net was able to buy less storage than it had originally planned.

Having successfully moved its insights business to the cloud, V Net is now looking to shift its entire service offering. The business is currently creating a next generation inventory management application to replace its legacy systems.

The new inventory platform will leverage the scalability and processing power of Azure to introduce artificial intelligence and machine learning into forecast models. This new inventory platform had been developed using the flexibility of Microsoft Azure SQL.

“We’re now starting to plan for the wider VMI business to migrate across to the cloud by year’s end,” Robin says. “This will see 100 per cent of our existing business moved to the new platform.”

It’s a huge undertaking that will see terabytes of business-critical information transferred into the cloud with Synnex ready to provide its invaluable expertise.

“V Net has further invested in its partnership with Microsoft, and has now become established as a strategic solutions provider,” Synnex’s Microsoft Business Development Manager, Mitchell Wong says. “We’re excited to keep working with the team and seeing where the future takes them.” 

Written by Adelaida De Foxa Eymar, Microsoft Senior Partner Development Manager

Original article found here.