EKON Modernizes with AWS and acens, part of Telefónica Tech

EKON is one of the largest Spanish providers of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and has ambitious growth plans. In 2020, EKON turned to acens, part of Telefónica Tech, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to improve operations, prepare for modernization, and future-proof its business. 

EKON is a supplier of software solutions that supports more than 4,000 Spanish small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Founded in Sabadell in 1963, it has offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Granada, Valencia, and Zaragoza.

The company wanted to streamline its customer data flows and workloads, escaping reliance on on-premises systems, hardware upgrades and having its IT teams spending 50 percent of its time on maintaining infrastructure. “The arguments to move to scalable cloud are really compelling for a business like ours,” says Ezequiel Parra Mestre, EKON’s CTO. “Our customers’ needs and demands are changing really quickly. As a leading provider and partner to these enterprises, we need to be ahead of those demands in terms of agility and scalability.”

EKON migrated customer-related data and processes onto Amazon Web Services (AWS) over a period of 17 months, paving the way for further, larger migrations with the help of consulting partners Claranet, and subsequently acens, part of Telefónica Tech—which currently manages EKON’s AWS environment.“We wanted to increase infrastructure capability in a progressive way, to simplify and streamline what we had, with the latest tools,” explains Parra Mestre. “It’s an IT infrastructure project, yes, but also a strategic investment in the modernization and future of an established business, with over 4,000 Spanish companies relying on our services.”

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) allows the IT team to focus less on day-to-day maintenance and use its time to work on enhancements with business value. It also provides the agility to respond to market demands. Other AWS services in the new infrastructure include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Auto Scaling, and Amazon RDS for MySQL. acens now manages the infrastructure of the new systems, while EKON’s in-house team deploy the fixes, configurations, and applications. Freed from infrastructure management and maintenance, the EKON IT team now has considerably more time to focus on creating more value for the business.

The migration of customer data and the move to AWS means EKON can invest less time in thinking about hardware. Backup is instantaneous and there is enough redundancy built into the system to eliminate any issues with capacity. Speed and disaster recovery capabilities are improved. EKON can now deploy new services in a few minutes rather than weeks, and it has the ability to scale these services quickly. “If I had to choose one benefit above all others, it would be the ease of scale without limits,” says Parra Mestre. “If I want to add or remove capacity, I ask acens to do this, and it’s done.”

EKON is now ready for further changes and on its way to full modernization, with a far higher degree of corporate agility built in, and technology cost savings firmly on the horizon. With customer data migrated to AWS, EKON is now ready to combine, partner, merge, and collaborate with other businesses and providers in Spain and internationally, as well as respond to opportunities and challenges in its marketplaces, to best serve its growing customer base.