Italian clothing brand Harmont & Blaine has chosen IBM Cloud to modernise its IT infrastructure and support its expansion into international markets, responding more quickly and effectively to its increasingly attentive and demanding clients.
The fashion producer and supplier needed to migrate its technological infrastructure from a traditional IT Managed Services environment to IBM Cloud to modernise its key business processes, such as supply chain, retail management and business intelligence, and rely on a solution with high customisation, scalability, flexibility and security. Harmont & Blaine also wanted to preserve business continuity and full compliance with industry regulations in the area of data retention by leveraging IBM’s infrastructure management services.
IBM with the support of its business partner BlueIT, is helping Harmont&Blaine transform and migrate its private IT infrastructure managed by IBM Services to IBM Cloud, modernising also its business processes based on SAP to better support its growth to global markets through a more scalable and efficient infrastructure.
Daniele Ondeggia, Harmont&Blaine GM, said: “Creative research is part of our DNA and allows us to create products that stand out for the modernity of the lines and colors, the ability to interpret the Mediterranean style, meet the preferences of our customers and retain them over time.
“The migration to IBM Cloud goes precisely in this direction, ensuring that we have the opportunity to manage the surprising growth in demand, in full reliability, security and with the flexibility needed to deal with in this particular situation of the market.”
The migration involves moving Harmont&Blaine’s IT infrastructure to a SAP-certified environment on IBM Cloud to modernise its architecture and make it scalable to accommodate its global expansion. The company’s IT infrastructure is provisioned through the IBM Cloud data center in Milan with dedicated and virtualised resources to ensure business continuity and the possibility of disaster recovery.
In this project, IBM is now collaborating with its partner BlueIT, which plays a key role in the infrastructure modernisation process. The IBM-BlueIT solution includes a hybrid cloud architecture, consisting of a private infrastructure in the IBM Cloud, with economic and operational benefits. In addition, thanks to the features of IBM Cloud and the support of SAP environments, the migration is anticipated to be implemented directly through IBM Cloud, without business disruption and will give the ability to dynamically adjust resources over time, with high levels of enterprise-grade support available 24×7.
Alessandro La Volpe, VP IBM Technology Italy, said: “We are living a period of deep and rapid transformation and we are proud to be able to support together with our ecosystem companies like Harmont&Blaine in facing the current challenges and expanding into new markets, also thanks to our global and local experience in fashion retail.
“By leveraging hybrid cloud, Harmont&Blaine can access an innovative infrastructure, that is agile, up-to-date and easily adaptable to the expanding needs of the company, particularly those of customisation and optimisation.”
Girolamo Marazzi, CEO of BlueIT, said: “Rapidity, operational efficiency and contractual transparency were crucial to the success of the solution proposed to Harmont&Blaine.
“The presence of a solid technology partner with global presence and local proximity allows Harmont&Blaine provided the flexibility, speed and reliability needed to manage growth and export the Made in Italy around the world.”
