Needed Cloud Expertise Found in Partnership with Lumen


A business doesn’t survive for more than 180 years by being averse to change, and this company has produced everything from locomotive engines to delivery systems for oral anesthetics since it was founded in 1834.

An industrial engineering and manufacturing firm based in Switzerland specializes in pumping solutions and services for rotating equipment, as well as separation, mixing and application technology.

As the company evolved from the days of steam engine power into the computer age, it never intended to be in the information technology business. So, when its enterprise data center grew to house more than 600 on-premise servers, leadership recognized the need for a partner with expertise in cloud technology.

“At a certain point in time, you have to ask yourself the question: Am I in the business of owning servers? That, for us, made it very clear that the cloud was the solution to go for, where we can just consume what we need,” said the Global CIO and Group Digital Leader.

Whether to store data and run applications in-house or in the cloud isn’t strictly an either-or scenario. Choosing from hybrid, a combination of both, or a private or public cloud is a challenge. The company decided to partner with Lumen, whose cloud experts understood the strengths of each environment and were able help navigate through the “cloud chasm” to an Infrastructure as a Solution (IaaS) transformation.

“This project was pivotal. We have a lot of infrastructure, and we needed to replace a lot of servers globally. We sell pumps; we don’t want to do IT. That’s why we’ve chosen Lumen to take care of the IT infrastructure for us,” the Head of IT Infrastructure said.

Lumen’s Hybrid IT Cloud bridges the gap wherever a business is on the Cloud journey. Its range of services includes private cloud, public cloud, managed hosting, consulting services and managed services.

“The key need was to do away with thousands of on-premise servers that were end of life and had to be replaced. It was also about increasing agility in the organization, so the cloud was the right solution,” said a Senior Product Manager for Infrastructure.

Partnering with Lumen for its cloud migration, the company relocated 570 servers to six global data centers in Germany, the United States, New Zealand and Singapore.

“We very much liked the technical capabilities of Lumen. Lumen really understood our business needs best. Today, one year later, we have more than 600 servers that we have moved to the cloud and this has given us a new set of agility and flexibility,” the Senior Product Manager said.

The Lumen platform offers on-demand provisioning of high-performing virtual machines. Cloud servers rely on fully redundant enterprise-class hardware, private high-speed virtual LANs, and storage that delivers up to 20,000 IOPS.

“Everyone has been very happy with the performance, and of course there’s a massive cost saving. And all of this this scaling capability that we never had before — this could only come through the very good relationship with the ‘Lumen A Team’ that supported us during this migration,” the Global CIO said.

For Lumen, the goals of a digital transformation are to help a business remain flexible and innovative, create exceptional customer experiences, protect its brand, and maintain customer trust. This is accomplished through prioritizing platform modernization, cloud agility and integration, and improved security.

Benefits to the company included cost efficiency (up to 20% lower cost of ownership versus in-house), faster deployment of new applications, reduced security threats, reductions in downtime and risk, and near-elimination of human error.

“If I was to look at our project again, I wouldn’t change a thing. Moving to the cloud was almost an immediate relief to our bottom line, and we’ve seen a benefit with every step of our journey with Lumen,” the Head of IT Infrastructure said.

Lumen Cloud customer resolves shadow IT challenges and successfully battles IT sprawl
“We sell pumps; we don’t want to do IT. That’s why we’ve chosen Lumen to take care of the IT infrastructure for us.”
Head of IT Infrastructure