Continuity, the modern way: Voith migrates to the cloud

Over its 155-year history, the Voith Group has been characterized by new innovations and continuous development. As a result, the company has transformed itself from a small locksmith's shop into an international tech giant. But continuing this success requires the right IT infrastructure. And the cloud offers just the right future-ready capabilities. This is also the reason Voith opted to access Jira and Confluence from the Atlassian cloud moving forward – with the aim of minimizing changes for users and customers as much as possible. 

The Voith Group has been based out of Heidenheim an der Brenz in the region of Swabia since its founding in 1867. The former locksmith's shop has, however, considerably expanded its portfolio during this time: Today, the company manufactures machines and systems for the energy, paper, raw materials, transport, and automotive markets across its three segments: Voith Paper, Voith Hydro, and Voith Turbo. Voith also helps its customers with their digital transformation. The family-owned company has around 21,000 employees providing support at locations in over 60 countries. 

To cloud or not to cloud?

Voith places a particular emphasis on software development and R&D as a means to strengthen and expand its role as a technology trailblazer in the hydropower, paper, and drive technology markets. All the more important, then, that its employees can be efficient in these areas. That's why, alongside other solutions, they've been using the Atlassian on-premises solution for over a decade. Confluence is also used for documentation and knowledge transfer. 

Voith has been generally happy with the on-premises solutions, even if they have entailed a few challenges, as Michael Hersacher, IT Project Manager at Voith, explains: "Whenever a vulnerability is discovered, Atlassian very quickly releases an update in order to close it. Which is great, obviously, but it also means that our employees who administer the servers need to react and roll out the updates as quickly as possible—sometimes even in the middle of the night so that the early shift can get to work straightaway." 

Voith is also concerned with making itself future-ready, including in IT. The server licenses expiring therefore presented a good opportunity for the technology corporation to look into migrating to the cloud. Atlassian and its Platinum Solution Partner veniture, which assisted with the migration, were able to allay any and all concerns regarding security and data protection in the cloud at the very start of their conversations with Voith. They also conducted a number of feasibility studies to guarantee a successful data migration in advance. So in the end, there was no need for the company to switch to a different provider. 

The technological and the human at a glance

The migration project lasted roughly six months, from March to September 2022. On the tech side, the project began with a pre-analysis and test migration of application users to the cloud, assisted by veniture. This helped identify potential issues or errors which could be resolved before the actual migration. Ultimately, the migration went even better than expected, with only a few pain points being identified (such as an add-on that stopped working after the migration). 

The test run was such a resounding success that Voith decided against a second test migration and transitioned directly to the actual migration process, where veniture as partner took charge of the technical migration while Voith cleaned up its data, established new processes, and ran tests. This clear separation of duties and responsibilities, plus regular coordination calls, also had a positive impact on the collaboration. Where processes no longer functioned as usual, veniture and Atlassian proposed feasible alternatives. As a result, Voith was even able to install a successor to the malfunctioning add-on around half a year after the migration. 

Voith demonstrated the benefits of the new solutions to relevant employees in order to make the transition easier for users and to ensure a high level of acceptance for accessing Jira and Confluence from the cloud. This includes ensuring they always have access to the latest versions and features or the ability to integrate other systems used within the business into the cloud via connectors. At the end of the day, however, what is most important to Michael Hersacher and his team is that, as far as possible, their colleagues can continue working as usual while simultaneously enjoying the experience of a modern system. "We wanted to make our system future-ready so as to stabilize our current way of working long-term, but with minimal changes for our end users. We've had virtually no negative feedback so far, which in Swabia is the highest praise." One reason for this is the new Jira and Confluence Ambassador Program, where members share information on new features with their colleagues and help answer questions.

Summary

While the Voith management team certainly had reservations about migrating to the cloud, once these had been addressed and the benefits laid out clearly—no more servers to manage, future-ready systems, a wide variety of connectors—they saw that migration was the right move for the business. The subsequent migration process was relatively quick and was so successful that the backup server that was kept on hand is no longer needed. Michael Hersacher and his team are planning to carefully monitor use cases for Jira and Confluence over the next few years so as to make their IT infrastructure as effective as possible.