Ajinomoto Indonesia

Vision

Visualizing the future of technology

Ajinomoto Indonesia are focused on delivering products that enable their consumers to live healthy lives. Ensuring they’re able to achieve this aim requires that they’re able to effectively communicate between their different sites, including their head office in Jakarta, their manufacturing plants and their branches across the country.

As part of a strategic technology review, they identified the need to streamline their business processes, to ensure secure, stable and efficient communications, centralize their IT infrastructure, and move towards the implementation of consumption-based models for their technology infrastructure.

With multiple legacy systems in use, the danger of disruption from power failures or floods presented a critical risk. Limited visibility of the network made identifying the cause of an outage a challenge.

In addition, many of their critical systems were hosted on-premises in server rooms with limited expandability, resulting in a poor user experience when capacity was limited.

A strategic analysis clarified the need to find a partner who could deliver on the company’s immediate requirements, while working alongside them to chart a path for their future technology environment. 

Transformation

A full-stack solution for all locations

NTT has a longstanding relationship with Ajinomoto, not just in Indonesia but across their global operations. Working together with the Ajinomoto Indonesia team, we developed an architecture that would address their key concerns while moving them to a fully managed service. The first phase of the project entailed a move to our managed SD-WAN for their key sites alongside the migration of critical business applications to one of our local data centers.

To ensure they were able to securely access their applications, we migrated mission-critical applications including their customer relationship management system (CRM) and other systems to a private cloud hosted in our Jakarta 2 Data Center. Moving to the private cloud ensured that they had access to flexible and scalable infrastructure, improving performance of their critical applications. This move also allowed the Ajinomoto team to analyze which applications might benefit from a move to the public cloud, and which were best served remaining in a private cloud environment.

They initially transitioned their core sites from their legacy network to our Managed SD-WAN service, providing users at these sites with seamless connectivity to their applications and data.

‘We needed a flexible and scalable solution to support the entire organization. A managed SD-WAN and private cloud provides us with the optimal environment to deliver this,’ says Tetsuya Tokuhisa, IT Department Manager, Ajinomoto Indonesia.

Following the success of this project and an upgrade of the underlying network infrastructure, they decided to move the remaining 50 sites over to the managed SD-WAN platform. With locations across Indonesia, we worked together to ensure that each site was seamlessly connected to the network.

This process aligned with the move of the organization to Office 365, and we leveraged the capabilities of the SD-WAN to provide local breakout of Office and internet traffic, while securely routing all critical traffic to their private cloud. This reduces the traffic on their core network, optimizing the performance of their applications.

Leveraging our end-to-end managed services, the IT team at Ajinomoto can focus on delivering against their business objectives, leaving the day-to-day operations in our hands. 

Results

A future built on cooperation and innovation

The partnership between NTT and Ajinomoto Indonesia has provided them with a flexible and scalable platform for growth. Embracing our managed services across their network and data center environment has enabled them to optimize their cost and operational efficiency, ensuring that they can continue to deliver against their promise to their customers. ‘Because of our long-standing relationship with NTT, we had complete trust in the ability of their team to deploy and manage our network environment,’ says Suparno, IT Infrastructure Section Manager, Ajinomoto Indonesia.

Reducing operational complexity

The move to the private cloud and the deployment of the standardized SD-WAN solution has enabled Ajinomoto to reduce the overall complexity of their IT environment. They now have full visibility of their environment, enabling them to act quickly should any issues arise. This reduces the potential for disruption to their business, while optimizing the cost of their IT infrastructure.

Enabling their future vision

The private cloud environment provides them with a flexible foundation for the next evolution of their application strategy. While this environment can scale to support the growth of the business, they have the opportunity to create a roadmap for a move to the public cloud for applications that would benefit from this environment.

A fully managed service

Working with us, Ajinomoto has transitioned their legacy environment to our fully managed service. This allows them to take advantage of our global expertise while freeing up their IT team to focus on optimizing their application environment and looking for ways to better support innovation across the company.