http://www.ge-villa.com/

At a Glance

Challenge: GE-Villa was looking for modernisation of the entire IT landscape and establishing the basis for a modular service strategy on their SAP based solutions. The management server tools provided by on-premise provider had created a confusing and disjointed management system.

Solution: Nubosoft and GE-Villa decided to work together to completely redefine the current way of managing infrastructure inside the company. Using the wide set of tools provided by GCP, GE-Villa was not only able to achieve a complete migration of Enterprise SAP workloads to the cloud, but as well to start exploring new opportunities of data analysis.

About Grupo Empresarial Villa

Grupo Empresarial Villa is a corporate with high commercial value and international operations. It is composed by a group of avant-garde, dynamic and constantly growing companies in the sectors of design, civil engineering, asset management, construction, gardening, and biotechnologies.

The company operates as a conglomerate of companies to centralize decision making for the leaders of the companies that make it up; Aridos de Cabo, El Palmar, Los Cabos Nursery, South Baja, Pro-Riego and Proasip.

The evaluation, migration and support services for the project were provided by Nubosoft.

Nubosoft is a Google Cloud Premier Partner focused on the Mexican market and experienced in thousands of Google Cloud implementations.

Grupo Empresarial Villa migrates SAP Business One to Google Cloud Platform

The Challenge

As CTO of GE-Villa, Antonio Peralta was facing the limitations and restrictions of an outdated on-premise environment.

As a conglomerate of companies, offices managed by GE-Villa are geographically scattered on the state of Baja California, Mexico. Due to network and budget limitations, it was initially decided that each office would be on charge to hosting its own infrastructure and management software including SAP solutions. This strategy was causing several issues.

The first problem for the IT department was the increased complexity of managing and supporting outdated on-premise hardware site-by-site. Additionally, software licensing was an unexpected cost as many of the software used had a CPU core-based pricing. Finally, there was obviously a data management issue as there was no way to have an automatic processes to centralize data acquisition. Tasks related to data analysis may take a lot of time.

Another key issue for the project was its very tight timeframe as the company wanted to start using SAP Business One, powered by SAP HANA as soon as possible. For Antonio, improving these business practices and selecting the right platform to migrate was a critical issue.

The Solution

GE-Villa decided to team up with Nubosoft and Google.

Google Cloud Platform offered a reliable, cost efficient and certified SAP HANA environment with the scalability and security they required. Additionally, it offered an enterprise-level network that solved the connectivity issues related to the scattered conditions of their offices.

The project was divided in two phases: firstly, their server infrastructure was migrated to Google Cloud Platform using several services such as Compute Engine, Networking and Cloud Storage; secondly, their development team started taking advantage of Big Data tools provided in GCP, such as BigQuery.

In the process of migration of servers dedicated to SAP Software, a new opportunity was found as the design team was presented with Compute Engine servers with attached GPUs. With this technology, they are able to replace personal computers with graphical cards for servers able to handle greater graphics workloads with a pricing based on time usage. With the help of Nubosoft’s engineering team, automatic processes for the creation of snapshots were configured; GE-Villa IT team is now able to restore their servers in a couple of minutes.

After the migration to GCP, the company experiences a new level of reliability for their workloads on a secure and cost-effective cloud environment. Their operating is now backed by both by the enterprise expertise of SAP and the intelligence and innovation of Google Cloud.