Andy Waroma (Cloud Comrade)
Cloud is on the menu for Malaysian spice powder, curry mixes and flour mixes maker Baba’s, which has migrated its IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the help of Singapore-headquartered cloud specialist Cloud Comrade.
The cloud computing consultancy – an AWS Premier Consulting Partner – led the selection, planning and execution of the migration from an on-premises infrastructure environment to AWS, being Baba’s preferred cloud provider.
"Based on our experience in migration and managed services and a thorough understanding of Baba's vision and business needs for the future, we were confident that the bespoke cloud-based framework we have developed was the right choice for the company," said Andy Waroma, Cloud Comrade co-founder and co-managing director.
"It is heartening and immensely fulfilling to make a significant positive impact on an already large and fast-growing organisation like Baba's within a short period of implementation,” he added.
The move was part of a broader digital transformation for Baba’s, with the first phase of the migration handled by Cloud Comrade involving the implementation of SAP S/4HANA on AWS, as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.
Baba's is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides a selection of SAP-certified, cloud native instance types. Additionally, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is being used by Baba’s to provide high-performance block-level storage volumes, to keep up with the performance demands of modern SAP workloads.
The company is also employing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Management Console and AWS CloudFormation, among other services provided by the cloud vendor.
Additionally, Cloud Comrade, in partnership with AWS, helped Baba's to implement Orisoft's human resources software for an end-to-end suite of human capital management and payroll solutions, effectively automating the organisation's HR operations.
The company also opted for the end-to-end human capital management and payroll solutions offered by SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Payroll.
Broadly, the addition of SAP S/4HANA on AWS, followed by the SAP Direct Store Delivery mobile app, with its enhanced SAP customer relationship management (CRM) offering with photo-taking to Baba’s tech stack, has proven cost-efficient for the company.
The new cloud presence has helped to shorten the company’s order processing and delivery times by 50 per cent and reduce order-to-cash cycles by over 40 per cent.
The automation of the organisation's SAP SuccessFactors, meanwhile, has enabled Baba’s to save HR staff costs and time, while increasing speed and operational efficiency and ensuring the highest levels of security and compliance.
Perhaps most importantly, the real-time reporting and analytics capabilities the company now claims underpins faster decision-making for Baba’s as well as more efficient recruitment, talent management and employee engagement.
"We deemed moving to the cloud as a strategic imperative to support our growth plans and customer-centricity,” Baba’s group of companies’ head of finance Ilaventhan Vijaya said. “Not only did we recognise the enormous savings in IT infrastructure and manpower costs, but also the great impact of speed, scale and security on almost every aspect of our business that the cloud offered.
"In Cloud Comrade, AWS and the foundation of SUSE Linux Enterprise, we found the right collaboration and platform to help us make this pivotal transition and transformation. The cutting-edge features, expertise and support during every step of this process contributed to the ROI [return on investment] immediately; well-positioning us to capitalise on new business opportunities,” he added.
In February, Cloud Comrade partnered with InfraGuard to enhance managed services offerings in Singapore, building out cloud automation capabilities to bolster product offerings across the market.
The sync-up saw the specialist provider leverage in-built automation and self-governance features via InfraGuard.io to help reduce complexity when managing hybrid workloads across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
