Customer Profile
Bertschi AG is a Swiss transport company that provides logistics and transport for the chemical industry. The company was founded in 1956 and is headquartered
in Durrenasch, Switzerland. Bertschi is a member of the European Chemical Transport Association.
While the operational focus of Bertschi is on the European market, the company is expanding worldwide and has 75 subsidiaries in 37 countries. Some of the customers that trust Bertschi today are BASF, Covestro, Evonik, Huntsman and Dow.
The company was offering a local real-time platform for logistics services which is deployed on their on-premise infrastructure in Europe. When their global expansion reached a critical mass, they had to think of a new global platform. They needed a partner that is available around the clock and accessible from all over the world. This is why they were in need of a cloud partner to host their new transport management system for deep-sea operations.
“As a logistics company, we were exploring many different possible cloud partners from the big three to some smaller cloud providers, but none of them was offering a ‘No Vendor Lock-In solution’ the way CloudSigma does it.”Markus Berner, Team Leader Digital Logistics @ Bertschi
The Challenge
Bertschi wanted to be able to develop their own application in the cloud without the obligation to use any vendor-specific tools of the cloud partner. This turned out to be the most important point on Bertschi’s decision-making checklist.
The performance of the virtual machines was also a key consideration as this would determine the responsiveness of the platform as a whole. CloudSigma’s up to date hardware platform combined with customization features meant excellent performance results.
“During our evaluation, we ran a number of performance tests with the top selected providers and CloudSigma easily matched our expectations.”
The specifics of Bertschi’s application required low latency since it shows live information about the position of their containers around the globe. Last but not least, being a Swiss company, the logistics services provider was looking ideally for a cloud partner that is compliant to Swiss law and regulations. At the same time, the global presence of the cloud provider was also of great significance. Having a global presence fit with their long-term expansion strategy.
“The focus of our operations is on Europe. However, we are providing logistic services also in other parts of the globe and we are planning to expand further our operations. In this regard it was im-portant for us to work with a partner who has different cloud centers around the globe. Furthermore our platform provides live information so the latency is an additional parameter that is influenced by the number of data centers and their location.”
The Solution
Like many other companies in logistics considering migrating their drives into the cloud, Bertschi had some concerns about data security. They were positively surprised by the variety of security measures and features available to CloudSigma customers to enhance different security aspects such as two-factor authentication. CloudSigma even managed to further develop one of their security features in order to match Bertschi’s requirement.
“We really liked the implemented idea about access control lists, but unfortunately it was available only in the backend. After our request, the developers of CloudSigma prioritized that task and made this cool feature available in the frontend. This was extremely helpful for us.”
“We are very happy to have had the opportunity at CloudSigma to implement a Blue-Green deployment scheme. This helped us enable a very smooth workflow and higher availability of our deployment.”Markus Berner, Team Leader Digital Logistics @ Bertschi
An additional technical advantage for Bertschi was the fact that CloudSigma supports high availability network protocols. Thanks to this capability, it is possible to shift IP addresses from one server to another. This way, the end-users can communicate with multiple servers seamlessly behind a gateway without interruption, no matter if one of the servers behind the gateway is down for some reason.
On top of the operations team flexibility, Bertschi was impressed by the flexibility in terms of applications and operating systems. At CloudSigma customers can run any x86/x64 compatible software, unmodified. As a result, Bertschi was able to develop their applications from scratch in the cloud, without
worrying if it’s going to run in the end or not using the operating system versions of their choice. Last but not least, at CloudSigma flexibility means also flexible price models. For Bertschi, this was of very high value.
“The pricing in the WebApp is very transparent. We pay only for what we use, even for a very short period of time. This has been very useful for us. Especially at the beginning when we were developing our application from scratch and weren’t sure about the exact amount of required resources. This degree of flexibility is a clear competitive advantage of CloudSigma, which we couldn’t find anywhere else.”
The Future
“Due to the partnership with CloudSigma, we have managed to keep our operational costs down. CloudSigma is definitely offering one of the best cost-benefit ratios on the market.”Markus Berner, Team Leader Digital Logistics @ Bertschi
CloudSigma’s cloud service has not only helped the company Bertschi achieve an important strategic goal in providing a global real-time platform for logistics services but also to decrease their operational cost – something of great importance in the highly price-sensitive logistics industry.
Today it is not a big secret that Bertschi intends to strengthen its position as a logistic provider worldwide. In this regard, they plan to expand their deployments worldwide. Further, they are considering to take advantage of one or more of the non-European cloud locations of CloudSigma.
“We intend to grow further into Asia. So, in the future, we might make use of additional capacities in CloudSigma cloud locations such as in the Philippines.”
In addition to that, Bertschi intends to deploy further projects in the cloud. CloudSigma is already on the path to become the preferred cloud provider for the logistics company.
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