Covantis’ mission is to transform archaic processes in bulk shipment in the global commodity trade. By relying on Microsoft Azure Cloud, the company has built a blockchain platform to empower agricultural shipping transactions.
More than 275 million emails are sent to process the estimated 11,000 bulk shipments of grains and oilseeds transported by sea each year. Covantis’ solution scales down the amount of manual workload drastically, making it more efficient. This also minimizes operating risks for the commodities trading and shipping industry.
The platform’s initial scope covers the shipment and execution of bulk commodities such as corn and soybeans from Brazil to any worldwide destination, optimizing export trade execution processes by connecting shippers, traders, and charterers. Initial users of the platform include Covantis’ founding members ADM, Bunge, Cargill, COFCO, Louis Dreyfus Company and Viterra. Hundreds of users from over 30 entities around the world have been already trained and onboarded virtually. This network will grow further in the coming months.
Petya Sechanova, CEO of Covantis, is delighted about the platform launch: “We have selected Microsoft as our cloud solution provider. Azure is a highly trusted and reliable solution compliant with most industry standards, enabling our success in the future. Additionally, Microsoft’s technology and products are already broadly used across our network of clients. This is why we chose Microsoft as a strategic partner.”
“We develop Covantis’ platform with focus on innovation and efficiency of emerging technologies together with the high availability and scalability our enterprise customers require”, confirms Yuriy Obriza, Head of Software Delivery at Covantis. “Microsoft provides us not only with the cloud infrastructure through Azure, but also with industry best practices, knowledge and expertise to implement an enterprise-grade platform.”
Microsoft contributes to industry transformation and ecosystem building
Microsoft’s team in Switzerland was happy to support Covantis and its founding members to deliver on the promise of this industry transformation. “Covantis is a fully cloud-native company, and this is a great testimony of how fast you can go-to-market and be ready to scale. Azure is the enabler of this solution – using innovative services such as the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Event Hub for Kafka, PaaS databases, and security components like Azure Sentinel”, says Fabien Robert, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft Switzerland. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem has also been instrumental in building this blockchain platform on top of Azure. “Going forward, we are committed to support Covantis and the industry to drive business transformation, and innovative use cases through technology.”
Marianne Janik, Area Vice President at Microsoft Germany and until recently Country Manager of Microsoft Switzerland, was excited about the project from the very beginning and highlights the bigger picture of Covantis’ success story: “Businesses that have already embarked on their digital transformation journey are seeing the benefits: With cloud-enabled technologies, they have access to on-demand tools and capacity tailored to their needs. With scalability and speed of implementation, they’re seeing increased cost savings. And with efficient, agile, and self-sufficient tools, their employees become more productive across the entire organization. In this case, Covantis is leading the way of this transformation journey for an entire industry.” Yet the story does not end there. Covantis solution opens the possibility to build an ecosystem around it by empowering other market participants to optimize their processes.
