Executive Summary
To stay ahead of their competition in the service provider industry, Comarch has evolved its business model from its legacy focus on software development, to new services that expand their portfolio of offerings and business opportunities. Today, the company offers end-to-end multi-cloud infrastructure solutions including the software and applications their clients need in sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and retail. Through multi-cloud solutions, Comarch’s customers gain holistic, cost-effective, flexible, high performance infrastructure that supports their business. The cloud-based solutions also allow Comarch to customize and deploy client systems faster, and with greater levels of integration, than previously possible with on-premise systems.
Challenge
Expanding on its 25-year history in software development, Comarch, based in Kraków, Poland, continually needs to evolve its portfolio of offerings to serve their diverse array of clients around the globe. Comarch’s current customer roster includes both large and small businesses, crossing sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, retail, and more. In these fast-moving industries, Comarch’s clients need robust and powerful infrastructure to accelerate the applications which are critical to their business. Paramount considerations for customers include attributes like performance, scale, reliability, and security. Also, tightening budgets mean that these organizations need to consider ways to reduce IT costs. Comarch must, therefore, innovate ways to deliver cost-effective solutions without sacrificing the functionality and dependability on which their customers rely.
While Comarch maintains its roots in the development of applications supporting enterprise-level organizations, today they must provide end-to-end solutions for their customers featuring capabilities like managed services, hosted data centers, and multi-cloud-based solutions. “The software delivery model has experienced disruptive change over recent years. Our clients rely on us to create the applications needed to support and grow their businesses. We must always adapt to serve them better. Our clients want to focus on the growth of their company, and let our team focus on the underlying IT infrastructure enabling their business.” Continued Zabieglińska, “When meeting a prospective client, we first want to invest the time needed to understand their unique business challenges. A one size solution does not fit all, so we regularly need to customize our offerings to meet the requirements of each client.”
Solution
The flexibility of Comarch’s multi-cloud solutions provides their clients many inherent benefits. By embracing multi-cloud architecture, enabling Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities, Comarch has greater flexibility to innovate end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of enterprise-level organizations. Bartek Jadczak, senior data center architect at Comarch, notes other key benefits of the company’s current in-Cloud offerings. “At the core of our business, Comarch is a software house. Years ago, we focused on dedicated applications and infrastructure to meet particular customer requirements and specifications. In those days, provisioning of physical hardware required significant time and cost. That has changed with the advent of Cloud services. We now build Cloud-based software and infrastructure solutions that offer our clients better integration, increased levels of automation, and more efficient utilization of IT resources. Plus, we can deploy those solutions more quickly than possible in the past.”
Intel® technologies enable our industry partners like Comarch to provide flexible hybrid or multi-cloud solutions for enterprises wanting to complement their on-prem computing resources.” –Todd Christ, Intel Enterprise Architect
To implement multi-cloud solutions with performance and reliability requirements needed by Comarch’s clients, Jadczak and his team chose Intel’s portfolio of high performance computing (HPC) technologies. “In industries like the retail sector, our clients need Cloud solutions that can handle thousands of transactions a second. In scenarios like these, speed is paramount.” said Jadczak.
Our customers expect high performance solutions, and we needed a vendor like Intel that could collaborate with us to build our robust private cloud infrastructure. Their portfolio also offers us a standards-based, holistic, HPC-capable product stack on which to base our multi-cloud solutions. Beyond physical technologies, Intel also helped us with resources we did not anticipate like technical white papers and product support. All of these things gave Comarch a leg up in a very competitive Cloud services industry.” —Bartek Jadczak, senior data center architect at Comarch
In addition to the Intel® Xeon® processor Scalable family, Comarch adopted Intel® Optane™ SSDs and memory to accelerate workflows like extreme caching or metadata handling in the Cloud. Jadczak also emphasized the importance of fabric for the greatest data transfer rates. “We selected the Cornelis Networks 100 Gb interconnect to replace our aging fiber tunnels because OPA offers the acceleration our Cloud solutions need. Because the fabric integrates with the CPUs, it is also a cost-effective way to optimize workflows,” he added. For these reasons, Comarch upgraded all its data center facilities in Krakow, Dresden, and Warsaw with Intel®-based technologies.
Results
Comarch’s multi-cloud solutions offer their customers many benefits. First off, running the needed workloads in the right places—be that on premise or in the Cloud—Comarch can help their clients determine the ideal mix of solutions for their needs. Hosted applications and services like those provided by Comarch give customers the ability to dynamically increase their Cloud resource usage as their business needs require it. Additionally, since Comarch maintains the Cloud platform and the data centers supporting it, clients do not need to worry about hardware upgrades. Together, these benefits create a cost-effective approach for customers’ IT needs with the adaptability for customization where needed.
Secondly, because Comarch’s hosted solutions offer high performance and inherent high availability, customers can rest assured of system speed and reliability. Comarch’s network of data centers around the world enable automatic failover and load balancing 24 hours a day.
Security represents a third concern which multi-cloud solutions can address effectively. Some organizations need specialized security capabilities to meet regional or countrywide legal requirements. In other cases, industry-specific security concerns—like healthcare companies’ requirement to preserve patient confidentiality—mandate particular security protocols. By offering clients a combination of public and private Cloud application platforms, as well as on-premise solutions, Comarch delivers built-in security features with the parallel ability for customization to meet additional requirements as needed.
Finally, customers adopting hosted solutions have reduced the need for developers or IT experts onsite. Through its end-to-end offerings, Comarch’s team ensures its clients mission-critical and proven applications remain up and running without client intervention. Should any unexpected system management issues occur, however, Comarch’s team offers 24/7 support to ensure single phone call can resolve a client’s problems.
In a highly competitive Cloud services industry, Comarch continues to innovate and improve multi-cloud services to keep their clients at the forefront of their respective industries. Zabieglińska accentuated the ongoing challenge, “Our clients face a great deal of pressure to remain ahead of their competitors and bring their products and services to market faster. For this reason, their worries are top of mind for our team. We are always looking for ways to optimize and improve our solutions on their behalf. Intel® technologies and their capabilities to enable multi-cloud solutions create a huge and positive impact in the way we deliver applications and the ways our customers can benefit from them. We believe that what’s inside your cloud matters.”
Solution Summary
Utilizing the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® OPA, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, memory, and more, Comarch delivers end-to-end multi-cloud solutions to serve their clients better. With Intel® technologies underpinning their Cloud service offerings, Comarch provides high performance solutions that give customers the security, high availability, flexibility, scalability, and customizability needed for their dynamic businesses. These multi-cloud-based services provide Comarch’s customers of all sizes a robust and cost effective solution without the complexity of on-premise systems.
Solution Ingredients
- Intel® Xeon® processor Scalable family
- Intel® OPA
- Intel® Optane™ SSDs