The Highlights

• Enabled 50% reductions in both server cost and employee efficiency.
• Split large applications into microservices for improved efficiencies.
• Met benchmarks in legacy migration while adding logging and security functionality.
• Supported agile deployment for a DevOps model.

The Customer

Arvato, a subsidiary of Bertelsman, is a big player in European IT. It’s behind many telecom services, building highly evolved marketing tools and CRM solutions, and working with over 70,000 customers with a strong presence in the Eurozone.

Arvato leverages cloud technology and other recent developments, including containerization, to expand what they are able to offer a growing customer base intent on modernizing in a quickly changing business world. The internal teams are guided by a passion for adaptation and continuous production of advanced applications that will serve business needs.

The Challenge

An ongoing goal for Arvato is to decrease e-commerce fraud, where part of the challenge was working in a complex landscape to address vulnerabilities and “patch holes” in systems. That set of problems involved working with the various parts of the overall architecture, as well as aligning infrastructure cost with business goals.

Over time, as they struggled to make numerous changes quickly and keep innovating, Arvato leaders realized they needed to move to a microservices approach so that a small change would not result in re-arranging many of the pieces of a giant hardware and software puzzle.

“Rancher has helped us improve our efficiencies. We reduced the administration, we reduced the cost, and we simplified IT and reduced the risk. Before, we had lots incidents, and now we don’t.”

- Dr. Sayf Al-Sefou, CTO

The Results

Arvato chose Rancher to help organize a new ecosystem where microservices fit together to produce great working applications. Rancher helps make clear where resources go, accommodating the development of microservices across the platform, adding capability and versatility to operations.

In addition, using Rancher led to a number of reductions in cost; for example, the new system needed fewer servers. Before Rancher, Arvato was running roughly 66 servers. Now, they are using about 33 to 35 servers, reducing operational cost by €600,000* because they could reduce their hardware requirements.

Because of the more robust, efficient systems Arvato put in place, their administration requirements dropped. Not only did they lower the number of IT administrators on the payroll, they also increased employee efficiency. Some of those on the front lines at Arvato say that the user-friendliness of the system and the intuitive nature of Rancher make day to day operations straightforward for all members of the organization. Developers and others love the intuitive, open GUI and how it “plugs into” container management. These savings helped Arvato increase employee efficiency by 50%.

*calculated in 3-year terms

“Our teams can focus on product development, and they can support the organization by creating new and innovative products. In the end, Rancher had the most impact in lowering our human cost and hardware cost.”

- Dr. Sayf Al-Sefou, CTO