IFCO transitions to cutting-edge cloud services with Microsoft Azure

The obstacles they faced

IFCO relies heavily on its homegrown MyIFCO system to help customers easily manage their RPC assets, saving them time and money. But after more than 20 years of development and updates, MyIFCO was due for a substantial overhaul – a comprehensive transformation geared towards revolutionizing user experience for IFCO’s customers, delivering faster functionality, and enhanced features.

With a large on-premises environment, the cost of supporting and expanding its capabilities was becoming increasingly prohibitive. The company’s challenge was now transforming MyIFCO from a monolithic system to a microservices-based architecture. As part of the company's growth agenda, IFCO realized they needed a more flexible platform to host their critical systems and data analytics solutions.

“For IFCO, the whole topic of cloud transformation was brand new," explains Kare Heikkila, CIO at IFCO Systems. “We didn't have any capabilities in this area, so we had to find the right partner for us and choose the cloud platform.”

IFCO needed a solution that would enable better customer experiences and features without the high costs associated with maintaining its existing setup. Based on how the company envisioned its platform transforming, the internal team quickly realized that Microsoft® Azure® provided the flexibility needed and a more complete picture of supporting services.

“Microsoft Azure seemed like a natural fit to us. We are a Microsoft house, they are one of the leading platforms on the market, and they are trusted by our customers,” recalls Heikkila.

What we achieved together

By leveraging Rackspace Professional Services, Rackspace Modern Operations Premium, Rackspace Elastic Engineering, the Rackspace Technology team was able to successfully migrate IFCO's critical systems to Azure and avoid major outages or problems.

“The new cloud environment offers significant advantages over our previous setup,” explains Heikkila. “Firstly, it's highly scalable, eliminating concerns about whether our critical systems can support business growth. Secondly, it provides advanced monitoring capabilities, including the latest security features, making the platform more robust and reliable for our customers. Thirdly, it allows for faster implementation of improvements, including new features from Microsoft, as well as core updates in our applications.”

Rackspace Modern Operations offered IFCO a blend of proactive and reactive operational support, enabling it to maintain its focus on development and innovation. Rackspace Elastic Engineering provided the flexibility needed for project-based work.

“You need all these solutions because the Rackspace Elastic Engineering pod is working 9 to 5, so who covers the rest of the day?,” explains Bellermann. “Because we’re a global company, our platform and our services are consumed 24x7, so someone needs to monitor that. That's why we have the combination of Rackspace Modern Operations and Rackspace Elastic Engineering.”

The collaboration has led to significant benefits for IFCO, including faster release cycles, efficient development processes and the ability to embark on new projects.

Rackspace Technology helped transform IFCO's approach to technology, making it an integral part of its product delivery and innovation strategy.

“We are now revising our IT strategy and roadmap for the next 3 to 5 years. We can look at things like how we exploit artificial intelligence. We are planning to upgrade our SAP solution and make the most of our current platforms,” comments Heikkila. “All of that combined, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure is an essential backbone to enable all of the things we want to do in the coming years.”