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The client and the context
Throughout its 70-year history, GGroup has demonstrated its ability to embrace change as an opportunity that could be a turning point for its business.
Founded in 1948, GGroup has capitalized on the countless changes the market has undergone to date, establishing itself as a leader in the auto parts market throughout Southern Italy. The ultimate challenge in providing the best service to your customers? The Cloud. Here’s how the auto parts giant handled the transition to the cloud.
The history of GGroup began in 1948 with General Auto S.r.l., currently the oldest and most renowned company in Campania in the wholesale distribution of auto parts.
The expansion of the product range, the brands distributed, and the services offered led to the founding of the Group’s second company in 1989: General Parts S.r.l.
In 1998, General Auto founded Giadi Group S.r.l., together with ten other leading auto parts distributors throughout Italy.
In 2008, an agreement was signed for the distribution of spare parts Bosch and for the management of Bosch Car Service and Autocrew, currently managed by the Group’s third distribution company: Global Service Car.
In 2018, a partnership was signed between GGroup, Ovam Group—the distribution group operating in the Triveneto region through the distributors Ricauto and Top Car —and Autodis Group.
As a result, GGroup became part of Autodis Italia Holding and, consequently, of the Parts Holding Europe group.
From this point on, Global Service Car S.r.l. and Service S.r.l. became two technical hubs of the Autodis Group (the former in Central and Southern Italy, the latter in Northern and Central Italy), together forming the new nationwide technical division called Xmaster. In 2019, the new GGroup Catania headquarters was inaugurated. With the Misterbianco (CT) facility, the distribution of auto parts throughout Sicily began via a branch that manages over 90,000 SKUs.
Today, GGroup is a well-established company in the southern Italian business landscape (Campania, Calabria, Molise, Basilicata, and Sicily) that is increasingly focused on growth and collaboration with major Italian and international organizations.
The facility covers approximately 13,000 square meters, 12,000 of which are warehouse space, and includesa training room and a diagnostic center.
“Innovation is the defining characteristic of entrepreneurship. It is the act that fosters success through a new ability to create well-being.”
– Bruno Tessitore – CTO, GGGROUP
The challenge
The challenge was to centralize GGroup’s management at the European level. The goal of adopting a cloud-based approach was to ensure business continuity. GGroup simply cannot afford any downtime, as this would result in a loss of revenue that would benefit its competitors.
The VMEngine Solution
Given the requirements and nature of the applications in use, GGroup, in collaboration with VMEngine, carried out a 1-to-1 port of the servers located in the client’s data center to AWS. (Lift and shift). The infrastructure designed and implemented by VMEngine is of the IaaS type. The virtual servers EC2 adhere to best practices for SAP workloads. The environment integrates Linux and Windows. The customer also chose AWS for the automation of SAP machine backups, achieved through AWS Backup andthe BACKINT agent. The following service was used to monitor instance metrics CloudWatch service was used in combination with its agent to monitor instance metrics. The Lambda was used toautomate the startup and shutdown of certain instances.
To enable GGroup locations to securely access the AWS infrastructure, ad-hoc VPNs were created for each location using the Transit Gateway.
Benefits
GGroup experienced higher-than-expected hardware demand, so thanks to the scalability andelasticity of the AWS Cloud, it was able to increase its specifications quickly and without any issues.
The implemented solution and the inherent features of AWS (99.9% SLA) ensured business continuity, preventing any e-commerce downtime that would have cost GGroup more than 50,000 euros.
“VMEngine has allowed us to focus entirely on expanding our core business by delegating IT management to our AWS partner.
Thanks to the VMEngine team, we’ve been able to optimize our SAP workloads by adopting the relevant best practices in the cloud.”
Bruno Tessitore
CTO - GGroup
