Every time the power went out, the computer servers at Oway Group had to be restarted. Whether it was night or day, or during the weekend, an engineer would have to go back to the office to troubleshoot the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system since it was hosted on-premises.
If the ERP system goes offline along with the servers, transactions will not be recorded, hence impacting business operations. For Yangon-based Oway, a leading travel company which started as an online travel platform in 2012 and has since expanded its services to ride-hailing and online groceries, it is imperative that the ERP application remains accessible 24/7.
But power outages remain common in Myanmar due to the outdated and overworked electricity grid. And each power cut could last for hours.
“We had very frequent downtime because the electricity was going out three to four times a week,” said Wai Lin Tun, senior manager, Oway. “Sometimes, the power supply is so unstable that it would stop again just as the engineer has completed rebooting the servers and getting the ERP application up and running, and he’d have to wait for the power to be restored before starting over.”
Moving to a local cloud
With the Covid-19 pandemic curtailing travel and bringing about lockdowns and work-from-home policies, Oway started looking for a solution that would not only solve this perennial problem but also optimize operational costs.
An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system that provides battery backup power is expensive and not feasible. At the same time, new cybersecurity legislation might require data to be stored locally.
Hence last June, Oway engaged Golden TMH (GTMH), one of the leading telecommunications companies in the country, to migrate its ERP workload to the telco’s cloud services. Compared to a hyperscaler, local hosting would reduce latency in the ERP system as well as comply with regulations.
“GTMH is the leader in data center services, with many big customers in Myanmar,” said Tun. “We believe that they will be a reliable partner and we trust their service.”
A full-service provider in the telecommunications industry, GTMH is also VMware Cloud Verified, a gold standard that gives organizations the confidence that they will be getting the best implementation of VMware Cloud infrastructure. The telco’s cloud services are built on VMware solutions such as VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter and NSX Data Center.
“Because GTMH is a carrier, we have the ability to utilize our domestic assets and redundant peering capabilities with all the major networks to address both latency and compliance needs simultaneously,” said Derek Hellmons, COO of GTMH. “This makes us unique and the cloud leader in Myanmar.”
No more downtime
Now that Oway’s mission-critical ERP application is running smoothly on the cloud, there is no longer any downtime even during power cuts, ensuring seamless business operations at all time.
Previously, with physical servers, the IT team would take days to troubleshoot whenever issues cropped up. But it now takes just one to two days as the engineers can monitor the virtual machines through a portal and configure them remotely.
If there is a spike in financial transactions leading to traffic congestion, Oway can request GTMH to increase the bandwidth in a matter of hours, which would be impossible with physical servers.
“Moving to the GTMH cloud has increased our performance by 30%, a really big improvement for Oway,” said Tun. “It’s enabled us to be agile and flexible so that we can adapt quickly during this uncertain period.”
Moreover by eliminating physical servers, Oway was able to immediately reduce the operational costs of procuring, maintaining, cooling and storing hardware.
“The pandemic has put a lot of financial pressure on businesses in Myanmar,” said Hellmons. “Migrating their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud not only greatly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure but also delivers increased manageability, reliability and productivity.”
Learn more about GTMH cloud services here.
