Mantrac halves IT costs and enhances agility with Microsoft Azure

As Mansour Group’s largest division, Mantrac Group is one of the world’s largest authorized Caterpillar dealers of heavy equipment and power solutions. With offices in locations like Dubai and Cairo, the company operates in 11 territories across the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, with offshore operations in the UK, Shanghai, and Dubai. “We have over 3000 employees spread across these territories and support a wide range of industries like construction, mining, marine, and telecoms,” shares Alistair Blair-Davies, Group Head of Internal Communications and Public Relations at Mantrac. “Our vision is to be the benchmark for Caterpillar dealerships around the world, by providing profitable and dependable solutions for our customers.”

Costly, rigid infrastructure that impeded growth

Mantrac’s huge operations required a large and complex IT infrastructure. Its data centers cost a lot to maintain and lacked flexibility for growth. “With on-premises infrastructure, we couldn’t respond to business requests quickly as the requests would often require the purchase of new hardware or technology,” explains Khaled Mohamed, Group IT Operation Services Manager at Mantrac. “Plus, with the energy prices rising, our operations costs also doubled.”

Mantrac’s outdated disaster recovery (DR) setup also made it difficult to quickly transfer its services from the main data center in Egypt to its London SunGard data center during drills, creating issues for its internal team.

Mantrac decided to migrate its London SunGard data center to the cloud, and more specifically to Microsoft Azure. “First of all, it was more cost-effective,” adds Mohamed. “After conducting a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study with Microsoft, we found that moving our DR site to Azure could save us nearly half the cost of maintaining our existing SunGard data center.”

With Azure’s native tools and services like Azure Backup, Azure Firewall, and VPN connectivity, Mantrac would gain better visibility, security, and streamlined access for all its global locations.

Gradual, smooth, quick implementation

Together with Microsoft and partner Inovasys, Mantrac started planning a phased migration. Given Mantrac’s critical business operations, one of the main challenges was ensuring minimal downtime during the migration. The company started with non-critical workloads to test the waters and gradually moved to mission-critical systems.

It also conducted thorough testing and validation post-migration to ensure everything was working as expected. “Overall, it was a very smooth process,” recalls Mohamed. “Inovasys was very attentive and helpful, and Microsoft oversaw their work, ensuring all the best practices were applied. Thanks to our combined efforts, we achieved our goal. When switching our service from on-premises to the cloud, we had a downtime of only a few seconds or minutes.”

More reliability, half the cost

Today, Mantrac hosts its most critical applications on Azure, ensuring the availability and performance of its applications. “Fortunately, we haven’t experienced any downtime. Our services have been 100% available, and we find the tools reliable,” notes Mohamed. “This has reduced the workload on our operations team, particularly in managing the data center in SunGard.”

Besides operational costs, Mantrac has also halved its hosting, infrastructure, servers, storage, and data communications expenses. “In total, we have saved around USD130,000 by moving to Azure. Microsoft also continues to help us with cost optimization,” adds Mohamed. “We have one or two conference calls every two or three months to validate and optimize costs.”

Flexibility and scalability for optimized operations

Mantrac has achieved the scalability and flexibility it needs. “We can easily scale the operating systems and servers up or down,” notes Mohamed. “Some projects are sometimes delayed due to business decisions, but we can optimize costs by turning machines off or adjusting their size to handle performance issues smoothly without delays. This wasn’t an option with on-premises servers.” Mantrac also no longer needs to worry about purchasing new hardware to increase capacity.

The process of transferring data and applications during drills has also been simplified, bringing agility. "Previously, everything was tied to our outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system,” explains Mohamed. “Whenever we practiced transferring operations from our main data center in Egypt to another in SunGard, we had to physically move servers. Now, we only adjust a few settings, making the process much easier and reducing errors.”

Securing the future

Finally, by moving its servers to Azure, Mantrac has brought more security to its mission-critical systems. “We can apply the latest security controls like Microsoft Defender. We’ve gained more visibility of our current workloads. This enhanced our security operations,” adds Mohamed.

Next up, Mantrac plans to move all of its 16 data centers across all regions to Azure. It’s also considering setting up a global disaster recovery (GDR) site on Azure to ensure business continuity. “Some of our servers are based on legacy systems or applications, so they will need to be modernized before being moved,” adds Mohamed. “We’re focused on modernizing our services using the latest technologies and moving to cloud services to leverage their benefits, availability, and modernization. Digital transformation is a key priority because we need to stay aligned with global trends,” says Miguel Paulo, Group IT Director at Mantrac.