Voith saves 30% by improving operations and consolidating workloads on AWS

Founded in 1867, Voith is a global manufacturing company that produces papermaking machines, components for hydroelectric power plants, and components for the transportation industry. The company’s IT equipment includes 3,500 servers in 146 locations, and the way that they were operated needed to be modernized. The company also managed several legacy applications that were difficult and expensive to maintain. Voith needed a solution that would lower maintenance costs, improve productivity, and facilitate scalability. “We believed that using the cloud would make it easier to access newer technologies,” says Holger Mutschler, senior manager of IT infrastructure and cloud transformation at Voith.

Voith held a competitive assessment to choose a cloud provider. It evaluated providers’ technology and company cultures by creating a demo company with issues for providers to address. “We challenged them with almost unsolvable requests and looked at how they handled it,” says Mutschler. “We saw how AWS interacted with us and viewed our problems as their own. We also saw the maturity of the solutions at AWS.”

Voith chose to work closely alongside AWS, including AWS Professional Services—a global team of experts that can help realize desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud—and Slalom, an AWS Implementation Partner, to start and support the migration.

The assessment phase of the migration included a detailed analysis, where each application was analyzed and routed to a rehosting of the application on AWS, to a consolidation with similar applications, to a modernization path, or to retirement. This approach optimized IT costs by consolidating and retiring applications where appropriate.

Operations that were scattered across the organization are either moving to a DevOps model or to a central team for applications where DevOps is not applied. Another optimization for Voith is moving consequently to managed and modern cloud services where possible to lower the effort of running systems. Further, security is now centrally managed and standardized across the organization.

These efforts are expected to save 30 percent of costs compared to the legacy setup.

“For every new service that we create, we consider whether it can be achieved using modern cloud architectural concepts,” says Mutschler. Voith also implemented infrastructure as code. “Using infrastructure as code makes it possible for us to maintain central quality standards globally while using cloud capabilities,” says Mutschler. “This facilitates consistent infrastructure quality across all locations while taking advantage of cloud features.”

Voith is in the fourth wave of its migration. “With each wave, we increase the velocity as the Voith team is more and more skilled. Our consequent approach to invest in upskilling our employees by working with Slalom and AWS is paying off,” says Mutschler.

Voith continues providing cloud training and other upskilling activities, such as hands-on AWS GameDays—gamified learning events—for its employees. The company is also implementing advanced FinOps practices. “We appreciate that we can speak frankly with the AWS team and focus on finding the right solutions,” says Mutschler. “We will continue improving the tools we use and identifying new solutions on AWS that we can implement.”