Huawei Empowers StabilisOne to Be the First Cloud ERP Provider in Poland

The ability to manage and combine core business processes in real time is essential to every modern company. It is not only helpful in tracking all kinds of business resources, from production capacity and cash flow to the status of orders, but it is also a blessing for employees, as it makes their work much more effective and simpler at the same time. However, all those perks come with flaws — traditional enterprise resource management infrastructure comes at a tremendous cost, especially for bigger companies.

Executives, as well as employees, expect access to information in real time, regardless of where they are and what kind of resources they are looking for. Under a traditional model, a company’s sales director would face a dilemma — whether to go to a meeting or to start implementing business processes at their desk. StabilisOne, a Polish IT company founded in 2015, came up with a solution.

With the help of Huawei and its partner Infonet Projekt, StabilisOne launched a brand new service — a cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. All you need is Internet access and a device with a web browser to use the StabilisOne platform to its fullest. This allows companies to reinvent their traditional work models and adapt them to the digital transformation era. Thanks to the cloud model, all activities can now be performed remotely — straight from home, while riding public transportation, or during out-of-office activities.

Business Goal

Offer the First ERP Service on the Cloud in Poland

StabilisOne offers integrated ERP platforms for comprehensive enterprise management — from supply chain, inventory, and production processes to project management, human resources, and company finance. The clients for this service are small and medium-sized companies that use complex purchasing, sales, or production processes in their business. Until recently, the company only offered its services with an on-premises model that required the installation of IT infrastructure at each client location.

A couple of months ago, the company introduced a new SaaS model based on cloud computing with a brand new data center built entirely with Huawei equipment. This first-in-the-industry solution allows the client to access software via the Internet, while the physical IT infrastructure elements, such as servers or mass storage systems, remain at the service provider’s campus.

Before this implementation could take place, it was necessary to modify the IT infrastructure. And, because of its complexity, one of the key requirements was to use a comprehensive solution from a single hardware and solutions provider. Huawei was one of only a few companies that could provide such a solution.

Another crucial factor was ensuring the highest availability and reserving computing power for applications and services — for which a new data center was built with the future expansion of the new SaaS service in mind.

Challenges

Building an Efficient Data Center from Scratch

StabilisOne’s decision to invest in its own data center was preceded by a thorough business analysis. A significant factor was that the company’s IT setup was based on Open Source (OS) solutions. Thus, basing the company’s expansion activities on external infrastructure providers would introduce risk.

Security was another important issue related to running the company data center. Providing ERP system-sharing services in a data center cloud requires the ability to ensure a high level of security. The company also needed to assure reliability and performance at the network service level. These requirements were critical for both StabilisOne as a service provider and service clients.

“Performance is crucial for us,” StabilisOne CTO Leszek Bober said. “Our clients are mainly manufacturing companies that base their competitive advantage on flexible response to changes, which entails frequent simulations along with production, internal and external distribution, and procurement resource planning. For this purpose, it is necessary to be able to process a large amount of data in a very short time.”

Huawei’s proven and comprehensive infrastructure could handle all anticipated challenges with no problem.

Transformation

An Innovative Enterprise Management System

To make the StabilisOne system available as an SaaS business model, the company had to purchase and install the IT infrastructure necessary to provide this specific service: servers, storage, and network solutions for LAN and WAN. StabilisOne decided on a comprehensive implementation based entirely on Huawei devices.

This implementation consists of Huawei FusionServer RH2288 V3 servers that benefit from the resources of the Huawei OceanStor 2600 V3 disk array. The mass storage systems are equipped with disk shelves and disks for a total capacity of 67 terabytes. During the implementation of the new data center, StabilisOne worked with the IT integrator Infonet Projekt. The data center also includes a Huawei S6700 switch and USG6300 next-generation firewall.

“We chose the Huawei systems proposed by Infonet Projekt because they provided the most comprehensive and financially attractive offer,” Bober said. “Huawei offered technical support guarantees for both equipment and services, which were part of our requirements. As we implement the latest technologies, without the support of the manufacturer, we might not have been able to manage this project.”

The key was to ensure high availability and reserve computing power for applications and services in the client’s IT environment. Thanks to their versatility, Huawei FusionServer RH2288 V3 servers not only support both production and test environments, but their expansion capabilities also prove useful in the implementation of future business projects.

The cloud implementation process included a network layer for the transfer of data backup processes to a second server room. Hence, the system needed complete LAN and WAN network infrastructure solutions. Huawei’s wide product portfolio allowed StabilisOne to integrate server and network solutions holistically.

Benefits

A New Source of Income

A cloud environment based completely on open-source solutions has been created using Huawei equipment. Bober credits this approach with enabling his team to control every element of the environment.

“This is of great importance in creating innovative solutions, since we spare our clients and ourselves delays associated with the support of closed software suppliers,” Bober said. “This approach to business unlocks new opportunities for our clients and ourselves, both in terms of data security as well as a very flexible development model of our solutions.”

The new StabilisOne data center enables the company to provide clients with innovative services based on cloud computing solutions. With the new platform, StabilisOne clients can launch services in the cloud for enterprise planning and management, as well as support for other solutions.

At the investment planning stage, StabilisOne anticipated operational problems between the delivered equipment and the open-source systems on which the company’s cloud services are based. Huawei’s proven and comprehensive infrastructure can handle this challenge without any problems. Another big advantage of the investment is the faster infrastructure. Administrators on the client’s side appreciate the solution’s high performance.

In the seven months since launching its own data center, StabilisOne sold almost 85 percent of its service resources to clients. The decision to invest in the new cloud SaaS platform clearly paid off.

“This decision is undoubtedly a success and has a very positive impact on the entirety of our business, while at the same time giving us tools for further development,” StabilisOne CTO Tomasz Pawłowski said.

Bober added, “StabilisOne is the first company in the Polish market to offer its clients integrated business management with the use of a cloud platform. This was all possible thanks to the implementation of a data center based on Huawei solutions.”

About the customer

StabilisOne is an IT company founded in 2015. It offers an integrated IT platform as a tool for managing enterprises or groups of production and service enterprises. The company designs and deals with the implementation of specially-made ERP IT systems that faithfully reproduce the company’s activities. StabilisOne ERP IT systems are meticulously optimized in terms of work ergonomics and operation logic. The platform implementation is offered in two models: on-premises (IT infrastructure at the customer’s site) and SaaS Cloud.