Five years ago, after numerous acquisitions, the IT environment at Ricoh Europe was spiraling uncontrolled – running 26 ERP instances was only 1 issue. “We reached some extent within the journey where we needed to tackle three things: Make ourselves more efficient internally, make ourselves simpler for our customers and [make our IT function less hazardous to our environment],” says Ian Winham, CIO and CFO for Ricoh Europe. “We work with customers on improving their infrastructure, and it came to some degree where we needed to start doing that for ourselves.”
Facing more and more pan-European and global requirements from its printing, document management and IT services customers, standardisation was a need.
“There has been plenty of chaos and plenty of difficulty identifying how you can manage a consumer effectively,” Winham says. The IT group started with application rationalisation, throwing out everything and ranging from scratch with the purpose to standardise not just on systems, but processes – a complete of 122 ultimately. Then, in 2011, they began its mess of an IT infrastructure within the same way.
Working with Indian IT organization Infosys, Ricoh developed a personal cloud with two T3 super hubs to provision both software- and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. “It’d be great to assert we knew the cloud was going to be the top-game in the beginning,” says Winham. “But we only knew that our legacy was costing a small fortune–both financially and relating to our environment–and what our end vision would seem to be.”
Public cloud doesn’t cut it
The public cloud was a no-opt for mission-critical applications. “We have to give our customers confidence that we all know where their data is and when it’s transferred,” explains Winham.
A private cloud is being deployed across 35 Ricoh Europe operating companies; greater than 50 percent of Ricoh’s customers are currently running on it in addition to it all core internal applications. “We’re now within the second stage, mopping up the legacy bits and pieces we’ve still got floating around,” says Winham. “We still have small data centers and IT closets floating around that i need to remove.”
The internal benefits had been clear. The corporate is consolidating nine data centers into two, so as to cut IT infrastructure costs by 30 percent throughout the elimination of one,000 servers. It’ll also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 16,800 tons (the equivalent of taking 3,350 cars off the street), helping the corporate achieve its 2050 goal to scale back total energy consumption by 87.5 percent.
But Winham now sees the cloud as a revenue-generator for Ricoh’s services arm. Among the many first cloud-based apps it developed internally – an electronic invoicing system in response to the ecu Commission’s newest push to control invoicing around the European Union. “That moved up the agenda within the infrastructure project as something that has real value for ourselves and our customers,” Winham says.
It’s a brand new approach that Winham is bringing to Ricoh. “If we will build something for ourselves, there needs to be a cost chain for us both internally and externally,” Winham says. Besides “It’s embarrassing if you find yourself selling an answer that you are not using yourselves. You look stupid.”
Navigating the eu regulatory environment was essentially the most difficult portion of moving to the cloud, says Winham. “The information protection directive is interpreted differently in every country so that you need to determine what standard you have to apply while also staying on top of things along with your customers,” Winham says.
Legislation in regards to the location of monetary data is even trickier. Ricoh needed to get approval from the govt. of Luxemburg before it may decommission its data center there. “I never like to build a knowledge center in Luxemburg again,” Winham says. “Those nuances are the true pain. And it has nothing to do with the particular technology.”
Of course, having found out how one can navigate the difficult terrain, Winham sees a brand new service line there to boot – helping customers arrange private clouds in Europe. “You have to eat what you sell, and we’ve developed loads of experience. One of several things we’re seeking to do is figure out where the synergies are between Ricoh, Infosys and other partners to bring those skills to bear,” says Winham. “Anyone can deliver the infrastructure or make it secure, however the strategy of the way you do this within your corporation is vital.”