Together with its partner Solve.it (a company acquired by the Stefanini Group), WINDTRE Business supported the migration to the cloud of the steel company Siderforgerossi. Then came the interview organized by Hardware Upgrade to talk about it with Andrea Canestraci, CIO of Siderforgerossi, Davide Furlan, Key Account Manager of WINDTRE Business and Tino Italia, Business Unit Manager of Solve.it.
What does the steel industry have to do with telecommunications? Apparently nothing, but upon closer inspection, the industrial world is now closely intertwined with connectivity. With the Industry 4.0 paradigm, production plants and machinery are interconnected to enhance efficiency and productivity, and recently, to find new ways to reduce energy consumption. Additionally, there is an increasing need in the industry to modernize IT infrastructure by migrating to the cloud in order to gain more flexibility and scalability.
A concrete example of how connectivity is essential comes from the Siderforgerossi Group, a leader in the steel industry for stamped and forged products. The company specializes in the production of large-sized rings.
Thus WINDTRE Business supported Siderforgerossi in their Digitalization Journey
Siderforgerossi faced a challenge. “We felt the need to improve our technology in terms of connectivity and availability,” explains Andrea Canestraci, CIO of Siderforgerossi. “This is an ongoing challenge, and we have relied on WINDTRE Business services to enhance our connectivity and access the cloud. Today, we are able to provide the service to all our users across the various production plants.”
When the time came to choose a partner, the company decided to rely on WINDTRE Business because “the reliability and proactivity they demonstrated towards us proved to be winning factors,” continues Canestraci. “Initially, the project seemed unfeasible, but WINDTRE leveraged their expertise and suppliers to make it a reality.” The result was more than positive, as the implementation time was very short, with minimal downtime. Now, Siderforgerossi is considering further extending this infrastructure to its foreign branches.
The Role of WINDTRE Business
What was the role of the telco and what services did WINDTRE Business offer for the migration? “Together with the client, we devised a solution that started with connectivity,” says Davide Furlan, Key Account Manager at WINDTRE Business. “We built an infrastructure that connected all the plants with high reliability, and then moved the client’s on-premises machines to the main data center, which is redundantly linked to a secondary, geographically distant data center.” In practice, the existing on-premises infrastructure was not decommissioned but relocated to one data center and replicated in another, enhancing security and ensuring business continuity.
But WINDTRE Business did not only provide connectivity: “We integrated additional services such as IT service management and cybersecurity,” Furlan continues.
Why does a medium-sized company choose to entrust part of its services to a partner like WINDTRE Business? There are many advantages, says Furlan. High reliability: “all the machines are redundant.” Scalability: “if the client needs to expand services, they can do so quickly.” Additionally, by outsourcing service management, the company’s IT team is free to focus on other high-value activities.
The Role of the Partner Solveit
WINDTRE Business offers a variety of technological services, but integrating them and tailoring them to the specific needs of each client is not straightforward. It becomes crucial, therefore, to rely on a technology partner that handles integration.
In this case, it was Solveit, an HP spinoff established 20 years ago. “A small company, but with solid experience in the enterprise sector,” says Tino Italia, Business Unit Manager at Solveit. The company has recently joined the Stefanini Group, which will facilitate its expansion into foreign markets. “We partnered with both WINDTRE Business and Siderforgerossi,” Italia continues. “This allows us to enhance quality because we better understand the business needs, enabling us to build customized services for the client. An interesting aspect of this project was the timeline: the goal was to ensure minimal service disruption.” In this specific case, the migration to the new infrastructure required very short downtime, in the order of a few hours. Behind this was significant work in designing and engineering processes, as well as replicating existing on-premises data in the cloud. “The downtime was only necessary to align the last piece between the old and the new. After that, we turned the key and started with cloud services.”
