iCumulus scale operations and harness growth using Azure and Teams with Logicalis

iCumulus is one of Australia’s leading supply chain solution providers. The Melbourne based organisation works with a range of customers both domestically and overseas.

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Challenge

As a logistics company also running proprietary software that ensures the safe arrival of hundreds of thousands of packages daily, the systems that support the operations must be scalable and always on. Although iCumulus was an early adopter of Public Cloud, building their platform in Azure, they were having issues with their current cloud provider.

The organisation wanted a supplier they could have a strategic relationship with that would guide and advise on the technology roadmap that would support their growing business.

As the leadership team continued implementing their vision to be fully agile and able to work from anywhere, the CIO wanted to remove all phone lines and integrate a fully VoIP solution for their communications and collaboration needs, when their current provider couldn’t do it, they realised it was time to look for a new partner.

Solution

When iCumulus approached Microsoft looking for a new Azure partner, Microsoft looked to their Azure Expert MSP partners in Australia. Logicalis’s name was top of the list due to the breadth of expertise in the technology areas which were a focus for iCumulus.

The team swiftly migrated all of the iCumulus workloads from their current provider into Logicalis’s Azure platform. Rather than a pure lift and shift, Logicalis recommended a Cloud Security Assessment to provide confidence their current environment was optimised for security and support, at greater scale.

The output of the Cloud Security Assessment provided clear recommendations around security, network, governance and application architecture. This was extremely important for the company to continue to grow and scale without security concerns.

The full migration of workloads including the security assessment and remediations took less than three weeks. In parallel, the iCumulus team were keen to cut their telco ties and move to a fully VOIP platform to help them be more agile in the field. Logicalis recommended Microsoft Teams and as luck would have it, the project went live about a week before COVID hit when they couldn’t have continued without it.

iCumulus integrated Teams calling with their Azure directory and now all staff can work remotely, they have a team lead currently working in Israel with the rest of the team either based at the Melbourne HQ or from home as Victoria continues its lockdown

Result

Although iCumulus was already an Azure customer, CIO Andrew Mauff highlights it has become crucial to their future growth.

The ability to service new contracts such as one recent order from the Victorian government to provide 150,000 home testing kits within three days, is only possible due to the systems and processes underpinned by Azure and Teams.

With such growth comes expansion and recruitment, CIO Andrew Mauff states working in a decentralised model and using Teams and Azure this has opened up the global talent pool, they no longer just look for the skills they need locally and source their expertise all over the world. This also provides major costs savings to the bottom line without quality compromise.

Having a new partner has made all of this possible and in Logicalis, iCumulus have found a partner that can scale their future growth.

Andrew couldn’t believe how easy Logicalis were to deal with and the expectations in timeframe and cost were met and exceeded, something he hadn’t experienced with his previous provider.