Keller & Kalmbach benefit from greater flexibility and reliability for the future

The cloud that keeps business running

Keller & Kalmbach decided to place their IT infrastructure into a managed hosting solution from a large cloud provider - Vodafone.

Business need

Over 80,000 items are on offer from Keller & Kalmbach, more than 750,000 parts can be delivered, and, with eLogistics, the business also offers an intelligent, IT-based solution for automated merchandise management. Innovative IT systems are the foundation for such a state-of-the art logistics service. “Sixty percent of our orders come to us electronically,” says Dr. Gregor Gerhard, head of Keller & Kalmbach’s IT infrastructure. “And our warehouse in Hilpoltstein is fully automatic, making it crucial for the IT to run smoothly.” Yet when reliability, scalability and flexibility concerns threatened the company’s running and growth, it became apparent that they needed external support for their IT infrastructure. Which was when Vodafone stepped in.

Solution

In the cloud and managed hosting selection process, it very quickly became clear that the major providers differed little in terms of performance and up-time guarantees. Because Keller & Kalmbach already used the Vodafone’s MPLS network, there was a problem free transfer to the data centre, since all required interfaces were already present. Though, perhaps more significantly, with Vodafone the company found a partner who could provide various services from a single source – with a dedicated contact person and uncomplicated access.

Business Benefit

Managed hosting by Vodafone has created numerous advantages for Keller & Kalmbach, with greater flexibility being the most notable, explains Dr.Gerhard, Head of IT Infrastructure: “When we needed more memory in the past our SAN (Storage Area Network) had to be extended. Always in relatively large increments and with investments in the six figure range. Today we only have to order the appropriate capacity from Vodafone, and four hours later we can use the memory, and we pay only for what we use.” At the same time, the availability of IT has increased in general. Power outages, for example, are not such a big threat because of the hosting in a state-of-the-art data centre. Meanwhile, Keller & Kalmbach is staying on the safe side with their compliance requirements because the Vodafone data centres are located in Frankfurt and therefore within the German jurisdiction (with all the certificates that confirm its secure IT operation).