A 60-year old Chicago area-based engineering and software development firm realized they needed to align their technology investments, strategic initiatives, and business planning. The company provides products to customers across the medical, energy, automotive, defense, and aerospace industries globally, and realized their business applications needed evolving. Their legacy .Net solution was not meeting their needs, so they reached out to BDO Digital for help. The company had four main concerns:

Customer Challenges 

• Their internal team was spending too much time maintaining outdated legacy system and not on higher-value projects.
• They needed to understand the business value of specific apps and their capacity for innovation, but they didn’t know where to begin.
• They were spending money on a solution that no longer supported their current business, and need help determining cost vs. return.
• They required assistance keeping up with both cybersecurity protection and regulations through improved governance, risk, and compliance.

The firm’s systems were operating on-premises and knew that adopting a cloud-first model was in their future. However, their internal IT team did not have the experience to support the transition.

Additionally, the web app they were using to deliver their software to their global clients did not have a content management system. This meant that every time they wanted to update their website, they depend on a developer to code content, which was time consuming and kept them from creating higher-value business products.

Modernizing Business Applications with Azure

BDO Digital looked at the company’s business app portfolio and scored them by revenue generation, cost to support, organizational impact, and innovation potential. They created a prioritized app modernization plan with estimated level of effort and cost. This allowed the firm to focus on high-impact app modernization, and they began with their website.

BDO Digital’s team migrated their site to WordPress content management system, chosen because of its low-code accessibility, customer training and enablement services, and integration with online video platforms.

For hosting in the cloud, they leveraged Azure App Services and Azure MySQL Platform as a Service (PaaS). They chose the Microsoft cloud solution because of it’s high-availability, reliability, and scalability, which allowed them to use Azure as their software distribution platform for their customers.

Results

The company’s decision to migrate to Azure gave them a much more robust network with improved uptime, which had direct business impact delivering often very large software solutions to their worldwide clients. Now, anyone can easily make updates to their site via WordPress, freeing up their software developers to focus on higher-value projects. And finally, retiring their legacy on-prem hosting platform and its associated costs allowed them to consolidate vendors and save money.

The company plans to continue down its digital transformation path with Azure, leveraging cloud technologies to grow their business.