Background and Business Challenge
The customer’s business-critical integration environment had become costly and increasingly dependent on a large production footprint, with periodic service challenges adding operational pressure. The customer sought to reduce that dependency by transitioning key integration patterns to a more cost-effective and resilient Azure-native platform.
Under its existing contract, the customer needed to reduce production capacity from 216 cores to 140 cores by the end of fiscal year 2026. Achieving that target represented a contractual milestone toward fully exiting that environment and was necessary to avoid renewing another year of capacity at the existing level. The resulting migration required an aggressive timeline, careful workload prioritization, and uninterrupted support for active business processes.
Why ePlus?
The customer required more than a migration partner. As an existing consumer of ePlus Cloud Managed Services for Azure (ECMS), they relied on ePlus as both a strategic business advisor and a trusted technical partner for their Azure environment. This established relationship provided deep familiarity with the customer’s operational requirements, cloud architecture, governance standards, and long-term modernization objectives.
Leveraging this foundation, ePlus helped define the modernization strategy, design the Azure-native target architecture, guide platform adoption decisions, support testing and issue resolution, and coordinate deployment activities across multiple stakeholder teams. By combining advisory services, architecture expertise, engineering execution, and ongoing managed services operations, ePlus helped the customer reduce reliance on legacy middleware while building a scalable cloud-native integration platform aligned to broader application modernization goals.
What Differentiates ePlus?
- Trusted advisor relationship through the ongoing delivery of ePlus Cloud Managed Services for Azure
- Deep operational knowledge of the customer's Azure estate, governance model, and application landscape
- Azure-native modernization expertise spanning Azure API Management, App Services, Functions, messaging, and integration services
- End-to-end ownership, from strategy and architecture through deployment, optimization, and operational support
- Outcome-focused delivery, balancing modernization objectives with measurable cost reduction and operational efficiency
- Long-term partnership approach, helping the customer optimize their Azure investment beyond the migration itself through capacity planning, reservations, cost management, and ongoing managed services
Solution
Azure-Native Integration Modernization
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Technology included Microsoft Azure API Management (APIM), Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, Azure networking and security services, Azure monitoring and operational tooling
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ePlus Professional and Managed Services:
- Integration platform architecture and solution design
- Migration planning and production deployment
- Testing, troubleshooting, and early-life support
- Capacity planning and Azure reservation optimization
- Ongoing cloud managed services support
Business Outcomes
Proof Points:
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Row 1
- Metric
- Result
- Business Relevance
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Row 2
- Existing capacity
- 216 to 139 production cores
- Exceeded the 140-core fiscal-year target ahead of the stated target date.
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Row 3
- Azure production scale
- 732 App Services in use
- Demonstrated production adoption across hundred of integration objects.
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Row 4
- Phase 1 savings
- Approximately $1M annually
- Reduced legacy platform cost through migration and core reduction.
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Row 5
- Reservation savings
- $62K monthly; $2.2M+ over three years
- Improved the economics of the Azure target platform through reserved capacity.
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Row 6
- Service Impacting Events
- 0
- Zero unplanned downtime throughout the engagement.
