Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) has been selected by Orica (ASX: ORI), one of the world's largest manufacturers of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems, to migrate Orica's IT infrastructure to the cloud. This important initiative will enable Orica to achieve higher levels of efficiency, agility and business impact, while optimizing Orica's capital investment and operating costs. 

Orica selected Cognizant as technology advisor and managed cloud-platform provider to develop a highly available, scalable, and resilient IT platform on a pay-per-usage model, to enable "anywhere, anytime, any device" mobile access to core enterprise systems. As a part of this initiative, Cognizant has designed and implemented a managed platform-as-a-service based on the SAP® S/4HANA intelligent ERP solution on Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, as part of the ongoing implementation, eight of Orica's core enterprise business processes are being transitioned to the new S/4HANA platform in 57 countries around the world.  

As a partner of Microsoft, SAP® and SUSE, Cognizant leveraged its innovative service delivery model through the  Cloud Assessment and Transformation Framework to design and develop the SAP® S/4HANA systems on Azure. 

"New technologies hold great potential for us to align with the needs of a fast-changing market by driving innovation and enabling new ways to work across every part of Orica," said Gabriela Azzali, 4S Program Director, Orica. "Cognizant leveraged its deep cloud technology and platforms capabilities to architect, design and build SAP® systems on HANA deployed on Microsoft Azure. They built business critical SAP® systems to kick-start the program right on schedule and implemented automation processes in operations to keep infrastructure costs under control."

"Cognizant is the right technology partner for us, with their strong credentials in architecting managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for SAP® on Microsoft Azure. Hosting SAP® S/4HANA on Azure needed a best-in-class foundational design and Cognizant's technology architects were able to create an effective technology governance model that laid the basis for this implementation," said Sascha Wenninger – Technology Lead, 4S Program, Orica.

"The Orica 4S transformation project has achieved solid business outcomes on time and on schedule. SAP® S/4HANA certified VMs on Microsoft Azure and other Azure services have enabled Cognizant and the Orica project team to rapidly deploy SAP® systems as and when needed. Orica will also benefit from Microsoft's world class datacenters, security, SAP®-certified infrastructure with High Availability solutions and the added assurance of Azure Site Recovery for Business Continuity and DR," said Brett Shoemaker, Business Group Leader, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Australia. 

"Making business critical systems such as SAP® S/4HANA highly available requires a well-defined architecture, and Cognizant, Microsoft and SUSE worked together to build a collaborative solution based on multi-node iSCSI server configuration. Significantly, this configuration is the first ever such deployment on Microsoft Azure," said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO.

"The ability to quickly and cost-effectively deploy, manage and operate modern, dynamic and scalable architectures on industry-leading cloud platforms is crucial for enterprises to achieve the future of work today," said Rajesh Balaji Ramachandran, Senior Vice President, Global Delivery Leader for Enterprise Application Services at Cognizant. "We are pleased to be helping Orica embrace the cloud and develop powerful provisioning, monitoring, and automation capabilities to increase operational resilience and manage market volatility. Cognizant's future-ready CRI framework providing IT on demand will help Orica empower employees, improve speed-to-market, and make operations safe, secure and reliable to deliver sustainable value to its stakeholders."