Kärcher Migrates Majority of IT Landscape to AWS, Cuts Costs by 20% With Zoi

Cleaning equipment manufacturer Kärcher worked with AWS Partner Zoi to migrate and modernize 70 percent of its entire IT landscape to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in just 7 months. Using AWS, the company has cut operational costs by 20 percent and only pays for the cloud resources it uses. It can now deploy new workloads on a global level in hours instead of months and can quickly set up new regions to provision new equipment using AWS Regions. Kärcher uses multiple AWS accounts globally to maximize security, remain compliant with local data regulations, and keep round-trip times to a minimum.

Kärcher, headquartered in Germany and founded in 1935, has grown to be a global leader in cleaning equipment. Its products are widely used in industrial, commercial, and home settings. Today Kärcher has more than 15,000 employees spread over 80 countries with annual sales revenues of over €3.2 billion.

Kärcher was running its IT infrastructure in a co-location data center and from 2012 had also started to use cloud services. This began with an Internet of Things (IoT) platform for fleet management and the digitization of a 900-page product catalog—both built on AWS. This experience led the company to institute a cloud-first strategy in 2016 for all new IT projects. “Our cloud projects gave us speed and agility,” says Leonhard Kerscher, vice president of IT and digital transformation at Kärcher. “Using AWS really supported our need to innovate.”

When its data center contract ended, Kärcher decided to migrate all its applications to the cloud. It enlisted the help of AWS Partner Zoi, with whom it had worked on its previous cloud projects. Zoi started by assessing all Windows- and Linux-based applications using the AWS Migration Readiness Assessment. This included applications for manufacturing execution, software asset management, and warehouse control, as well as customer-facing applications, such as the company website and online store. Of the 120 applications assessed, Zoi determined that almost 20 of them could be retired with the remainder migrated.

Zoi began by migrating 100 applications, representing 70 percent of Kärcher’s application landscape at the time. A full 95 percent of these were rebuilt, re-platformed, and right-sized for the cloud, with the project completed in 7 months. The company built most of its applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows and Linux instances, giving it secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For its main database system, the company links its applications to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which allows it to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks.

Kärcher containerized its customer-facing applications, running these on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), the most trusted way to start, run, and scale Kubernetes. This helps the company to scale these applications and minimize downtime. To ensure that Kärcher’s IT team could manage the new processes required to manage the new cloud setup, Zoi provided training on all aspects of the new infrastructure from handling backups to setting up new environments.

Using AWS, Kärcher has saved 20 percent overall on its operational costs. It achieved this by being able to remove unused applications and by reducing the overall system size. In addition, instead of running all its applications on a 24/7 basis, the company now only pays for the cloud services it uses. For example, instead of continually running its stock management application, the company now uses it for just the required 7 days it needs annually. “Along with cost savings, we’ve also reduced the load on internal resources,” says Kerscher. “Just managing systems’ licensing properly was time consuming—now that’s gone.”

Zoi is also helping the company to manage its cloud costs on a monthly basis. For example, it can now see if it needs to re-size an application or can benefit from using a newer AWS service version with a better price-to-performance ratio. Using AWS also triggers alarms so that the company can optimize its cloud infrastructure to see if unused items can be turned off. “Kärcher now has a much tighter control over costs,” says Benjamin Hermann, managing director at Zoi. “Using monthly cloud usage reports, the company can easily fine-tune its system.”

Kärcher is also supporting its manufacturing processes using multiple AWS Regions in Australia, Europe, India, Japan, North America, and Singapore for lower latency connections to production sites. For example, it can control driverless forklift trucks directly from AWS data centers. The company has also increased security and compliance using several AWS accounts spread over different worldwide regions, making its system less vulnerable to attack. “By dividing our AWS usage into smaller pieces, we have more control and visibility,” says Kerscher. “If one account has an issue, it won’t affect every system—and we can better adhere to data laws in each region.”

By building on AWS, Kärcher can deploy workloads globally in less than a day compared to the weeks or months it took previously. It is also easier to set up new environments rapidly without the need to provision and install new equipment. “Currently, we are building a new factory in Vietnam—the first one without any local server,” says Kerscher. “With AWS, we can very quickly set up a new region and provide infrastructure for the required applications in just a few minutes.”

Kärcher has already begun working with Zoi to migrate the SAP applications that it is still running in its outsourced data center. The full migration of the company’s entire application landscape is set to be completed in 2024.

This will see the company go all-in on AWS. “In a short timeframe, we’ve managed to migrate and modernize a lot of our IT landscape on AWS,” says Kerscher. “The competency of Zoi in helping us manage our cloud transition frees us up to focus on one of Kärcher’s main driving principles, that of innovation.”