Village Roadshow was founded by Roc Kirby in Melbourne, Australia in 1954 and has been listed on the Australian Securities Exchange since 1988. Since these humble beginnings, VRL has become a leading entertainment company with well recognised retail brands. Village Roadshow holds a diversified portfolio of assets including Theme Parks, Cinema Exhibition, Film Distribution and Film Production, entertaining millions of people, as well as promotion and loyalty businesses within the Marketing Solutions division.
A complex collection of information systems keep our business running. It’s critical that everything is tightly integrated and operates smoothly. SAP is at the heart of this, as it gathers corporate information and interfaces with many other systems. Across the VRL group, there are about 100 unique interfaces connecting 30 separate systems to the SAP core systems.
Technology is critical to our business – but it isn’t and shouldn’t be our sole focus. We felt we needed a cost effective, secure and reliable information ecosystem that just works so that we can concentrate on deploying the best technology to support the business divisions.
We have already moved a few systems to the cloud and recently decided to close our co-located data centre and transition our SAP systems into the cloud. We looked at the range of options, and selected Azure.
We decided it would be best to work with a specialist IT services business that had a track record with SAP and the cloud. BNW fit the bill. It has specialised in SAP for 20 plus years and had a track record moving SAP to Microsoft Azure. The fact that Microsoft has had a long and enduring partnership with SAP was also important – we wanted a solution that will last.
With Microsoft’s Azure cloud service being available locally from two data centres, we were confident in the data sovereignty and resilience. Since we went live that has been proven – we have had 100 per cent uptime.
SAP on Azure allows us to scale up or down whenever and wherever we need. Additionally, because we’re not running our own data centres we don’t need “just in case” headroom – if we need more computer power, we can just dial it up.
The total cost of ownership for SAP on Azure was an important factor to us along with improved RTO, RPO and Disaster Recovery posture.
We’re confident that Microsoft will continually invest in world class Azure technologies and management best practice. They take care of that so we can take care of business.
