Auteco Mobility migrates 95% of its server infrastructure to Azure and decentralizes its operation

81 years ago, Auteco Mobility started as a spare parts sales business. Over time, the Colombian company has become a leader in the mobility and spare parts market, occupying more than 90% of the South American country's electric mobility market, including motorcycles, scooters, electric unicycles, cars, trucks, pickup trucks and their spare parts.

Today, Auteco Mobility has more than 1,300 employees and multiple production sites distributed all over Colombia. Transformations have always been part of the company's DNA, but five years ago the cloud was not part of its reality. "We were a company with a 100% traditional infrastructure and on-premises, but we didn't delay in evaluating all the options that the market offered us to decide that our future was in the Azure cloud," says Carlos Andres Marin, Platforms and Technology Infrastructure Leader at Auteco Mobility. During the evaluation process that lasted more than 2 years, the entire Auteco Mobility technology team—from Adriana Vargas, its CIO and Santiago Restrepo Technical Manager of the project, to the support of Neoris Colombia S.A.S, partner of Microsoft and SAP in enabling digital solutions and implementer of the project—were vital in the decision-making, design and implementation of this large project. 

Implementation

While evaluating which public cloud to choose for its SAP and non-SAP workloads, the company always made clear its interest in learning from scratch to have the best foundations in cloud technology and make the best decisions. Microsoft offered Auteco Mobility the opportunity to build a critical training plan with all the information required for the work team. Marin recognizes that this opportunity facilitated the success of the migration. “In three months, we were able to get certification in Azure before making the decision and executing the migration project, which brought us many temporal and dynamic benefits in the implementation.” 

Before and after 

The migration enabled Auteco Mobility to filter operational loads, reducing its number of servers from 52 to 36. In terms of performance, the company achieved improvements between 30% and 100% of critical processes and achieved stability within 2 weeks of completion of implementation. According to Marin, part of the migration success motivated the company to only invest what had initially been discussed. "The step we took from on-premises servers to the Azure cloud gave us peace of mind that we can transform our infrastructure at the speed we need and that the business requires, which gives us a competitive advantage over the rest." 

Expanding future

Auteco Mobility is only looking to continue to grow, and that means an expansion into several Latin American countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and Chile. "Migrating was a strategic move that enabled a previously unthinkable expansion scenario. With its own data center in Colombia, we would have many operational risks when projecting outside the country. Today, the Azure cloud makes it possible in a secure way," concludes Carlos.