Kerridge Commercial Systems, a supplier of ERP software, approached Claranet Benelux with the assignment to migrate the platform on which one of the ERP systems runs to the IaaS proposition that Claranet offers. “The IT team at Kerridge CS did not have the capacity to set up the entire sub-layer, i.e. the IaaS part, themselves,” says Peter van den Broek, Sales Specialist at Claranet Benelux. “They wanted to engage a party that deals with it on a daily basis and has expertise in it.” Claranet built the platform and manages the sub-layer, i.e. the hardware and VMs, while the Kerridge CS team manages the entire application layer. “The two teams work together very intensively on a daily basis,” Van den Broek explains. “This is to ensure that the customer environments work well and are tweaked.”
About Kerridge Commercial Systems
Client Kerridge Commercial Systems, often abbreviated to Kerridge CS or KCS, is a British supplier of ERP systems. This collaboration with Claranet Benelux concerns a business unit that was part of Unit4 until 2020, as Unit4 Wholesale BV. This unit supplies ERP solutions for wholesale, logistics and construction.
“Kerridge Commercial Systems has grown, partly through acquisitions, into a supplier of 29 ERP systems that are used worldwide under the Kerridge CS flag,” says Arjan de Later. He is Head of Global Cloud Platform Operations at Kerridge Commercial Systems and his team is closely involved in the collaboration with Claranet Benelux. Another business unit of Kerridge CS, MAM Software, already worked with the British branch of Claranet in the United Kingdom. That is how the collaboration in the Netherlands also came about.
The background of the case
As mentioned, Kerridge CS took over the business unit Unit4 Wholesale BV from Unit4. “Just like Kerridge CS, Unit4 also had many business units that focused on specific sectors. Apart from sector-oriented solutions in the various ERP systems that were supplied, there were also generic questions that played a role in all solutions,” says De Later. “An important theme was the need for a cloud-based solution.”
In practice, the software solutions that the Unit4 components (at the time) delivered were products that were not actually cloud-ready. “They were not yet web-based applications. They were also usually not suitable as a SaaS solution,” De Later reflects. “They were in fact native Windows applications.”
The previous parent company set up a separate Cloud Services division. That department provided cloud services to the various sister companies. At some point, the parent company was taken off the stock exchange by a private equity firm with the intention of selling the whole thing sooner or later. “Ultimately, the decision was made to split up the company and sell the various parts, including Unit4 Wholesale BV, separately. That is how this part ended up at Kerridge CS.”
The question that arose then was: what should happen next with the Cloud Services division? De Later: “They were distinctive because of their clientele. The decision was then made to transfer the personnel of this division that were primarily involved in a specific business unit to the various business units. “That is how a number of those people ended up in my team.”
The De Later team currently consists of eleven employees who work on the platform in the Netherlands, in addition to five people who manage the platform in England and a team of six people who work on the technical work surrounding the various ERP products in the Benelux.
The concrete case
With the acquisition of Unit 4 Wholesale, Kerridge CS also took with it the customers who used the services provided by Unit4 Cloud Services. “We had to do something with that, because the platform, which was running in a Unit4 data center, had to be moved to another provider. The deadline for that was December 2021.”
Claranet was chosen because the company had already proven in the United Kingdom that it had the necessary knowledge in-house.
Kerridge CS hired IT Value as an IT consultancy to work with its own cloud specialists to provide input for the design of a new platform. De Later: “The starting point had to be that customers could be migrated as easily as possible. After all, the move was not necessary for those customers, nor would they pay for it, so the transition had to be quick and efficient.”
The initial design was ready at the end of 2020. In January 2021, Claranet started building and delivered the hardware environment, with a VMWare hypervisor layer on top. “Then we joined in with our team and started building the platform on that hypervisor layer. Initially mainly by IT Value, but my team quickly took over the construction, daily management and migrations themselves.”
With, as mentioned, a deadline of the end of December 2021, because at that time the support of the former parent company for hosting the platform would end contractually. The tight deadline caused the necessary stress for the IT team. "It was not a good period," sighs De Later. "But we succeeded. In the second week of December 2021, the last bits and bytes were removed from the former parent company and the platform and all customers were running at Claranet."
The current situation
In the old situation, the hardware was at Digital Realty, now everything runs in the Interconnect data center, in the Claranet corridor. De Later: “We were able to make some different agreements about that, compared to other collaborations with IaaS providers.” For example, they have dedicated hardware for the 400-plus VMs. “They run on a select portion of the physical servers that Claranet has available for us. And only our VMs run on those.”
According to De Later, this is necessary because Citrix is used, namely Citrix Provisioning. “We generate and spin up VMs from Citrix. To be able to do this, you need direct access to the hypervisor, to Vsphere. For that, you actually need your own hypervisor environment, your own cluster. And Claranet built that for us.”
We asked De Later whether a migration to a Public Cloud environment would have been possible. “In theory, yes,” is the answer. “If it weren’t for the fact that we don’t deliver applications from the cloud. Kerridge CS really delivers a fully managed desktop.” This has a historical background, explains the Head of Global Cloud Platform Operations. “Most ERP applications have a history of decades, they are not suitable for running in a cloud environment. The systems require a desktop with links on the same machine to Outlook, Word, Excel and, for example, WMS systems that are used.”
The different applications need each other on that workstation. “We achieve this by delivering a virtual desktop. We do this based on Citrix. For a long time, hyperscalers were not really realistic options because of the poor performance that often went with running the type of environments that Kerridge uses.”
A special aspect of the services that Kerridge provides is the fact that older versions of the software are supported for a long time. De Later: “Kerridge's policy is that we do not tell customers who work with one of our ERP applications that the plug will be pulled on an application after a few years. We do of course provide migration paths, to better and/or new solutions, but a deadline is rarely attached to that. It is up to the customer whether and when he makes the switch.”
This means an extra burden for the team and an extra complexity in the platform. “The challenge is to continue to offer the most modern support with somewhat older technology.”
In the meantime, the number of Kerridge managed desktop customers has grown further. De Later: “The entire IT infrastructure of our customer runs on the IaaS platform. For each customer, this means that their own domain controller, the print server, all application servers, the Citrix server and the database server, but also the entire directory and file structure in their customer container within our platform at Claranet, runs.” Locally, the customer does not need more than print and workplace devices, in addition to internet access and a VPN tunnel to the platform.
The division of roles between Kerridge CS and Claranet
“What Claranet provides within the collaboration is that we have sufficient resources on the IaaS platform that VMware runs on and that we can access via the Vsphere,” De Later indicates. “We can start, stop, enlarge and reduce VMs there.”
Claranet provides Vsphere and access to it, and especially the backup. De Later: “With Veeam they make Application-Aware backups of all the VMs that we have running.” That is a shared responsibility, because De Later and his team have to ensure that the Veeam agent is present with the right service accounts on that VM. The backup lands at Claranet and is replicated to a Digital Realty data center in Amsterdam. “That part is completely managed by Claranet.”
The process
Looking back, De Later indicates that the migration was a complex process. “The big unknown was of course the new platform, which had to be completely rebuilt. Initially together with IT Value, a party that we did not know before this project.” In addition, the original platform was not perfect either. “So during the process you have to constantly consider whether to fix those handicaps or to take them over in the first place. That actually created too much of a workload for the team that was responsible for it.”
De Later is satisfied with the collaboration with Claranet. “We did not know the organization, but we were and are very happy that we work with them.” De Later responds to the slogan 'Big enough to deliver, small enough to care' of Claranet. “That suits us well. They have all the technology in-house, but also ensure personal contact. The organization is flexible and thinks along with the customer.” De Later indicates that his team did not know everything and that the team of Claranet provided good support in this.
“On the other hand, 'small enough' sometimes has disadvantages. We thought everything was under control and there were still gaps. But the associated pragmatic work attitude suited us, problems were solved smoothly.”
The Future
In the future, Kerridge CS also wants to be able to deliver the ERP software as a published app. “We are currently developing this further. The Wholesale application is now available as a published app. In that case, it means that at Claranet we only deliver the application to customers on VMs instead of a complete Citrix desktop.” This solution would make the whole thing even easier to scale. “In addition, at a higher level within Kerridge CS, the question is whether a switch to a hyperscaler should not be considered for certain services.”
De Later doesn't see that happening for the existing platform for the time being. "And if that does happen, they are in good hands at Claranet, with a complete Elastic Architecture migration project via our Solution Architects and engineers," adds Peter van den Broek of Claranet.
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