Australian renewable packaging and paper company Opal Group has undergone a major cloud transition to Macquarie Telecom following advice that its previous provider, Fujitsu, would stop supporting the company’s storage network.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Opal Group, owned by Nippon Paper Group, has more than 4,500 staff and 80 sites across Australia and New Zealand. The company specialises in sustainable fibre packaging and paper solutions, and exports Australian-made products to 70 countries across the world. The current business was born out of a $1.72 billion merger.

Following the merger, Opal said part of its business had previously suffered from major outage issues with its datacentre provider, and further identified a substandard storage area network (SAN) and disaster recovery (DR) posture, which left unattended risked its ability to manufacture and deliver products to customers.

These include some of Australia’s largest retail and FMCG companies, which rely on Opal to provide essential goods and services to often lockdown-stricken communities. The company had targeted it for early replacement but was given a further post-acquisition issue with the late advice on storage support.

“We essentially had three months to tender, prepare and contract, and three months to transition over the Christmas period,” Opal Group chief information officer Phil Boon said.

“This was petabytes of data, 85 virtual machines, and it was all tied to our most critical workloads including SAP financial systems and operational applications.

“We reviewed options from a range of providers tied to each major cloud player, and the Macquarie and Azure combination stood out. We had confidence in their partnership and the dual accountability that came with it, their sensible proposal, commercial flexibility, and – most importantly – confidence in their ability to get the job done under a tight deadline.”

The Macquarie and Azure team worked closely with Boon’s team, as well as manufacturing technology partner Realtek, which helped manage SAP applications to successfully transition services and workloads into Macquarie’s cloud environment.

Opal is now looking at how it can leverage Macquarie and Azure’s ecosystem to focus more on applications and how it can improve its business processes.

“The Macquarie and Microsoft partnership was already a huge drawcard. Now it’s like we’ve got a direct line to Azure, to the very coders putting together the next generation of services. It’s clear this is going to have a hugely positive impact on our business as we continue to grow,” Boon said.