Gant, the Stockholm-based clothing retailer
GANT is an international clothing company headquartered in Stockholm with more than 1600 employees distributed in more than 70 countries and the brand is available at 4 000 selected retailers. The company has roots since 1907. In the late ‘70s, the company was bought by three Swedish entrepreneurs and since 2008 owned by the Swiss family enterprise Maus Frères. GANT’s mission and goal is to create durable, lovable, timeless garments from high-quality materials that last year after year.
The Challenge
GANT’s core SAP system, housed on an ageing on-premise infrastructure, faced looming hardware obsolescence and expiring support contracts. The traditional path of renewing hardware and support agreements offered little in the way of innovation and would lock the company into substantial investments with limited operational flexibility.
Their Strategy
Instead, GANT would like to move their SAP system to Google Cloud. By doing so, they are avoiding the large upfront investment of buying new hardware, and either dramatically reduce or completely eliminate ongoing support costs. Plus, Google Cloud gives them the flexibility to easily scale resources up or down to match demand, optimising their spending and ensuring they always have the performance they need. Furthermore, they’ll also benefit from Google Cloud’s superior backup and disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring the safety and accessibility of their critical data.
The Solution
Recognising the need for modernisation, GANT partnered with Devoteam to seamlessly migrate their SAP system to Google Cloud. We meticulously mirrored GANT’s existing SAP environment on Google Cloud. Starting with a Stratozone-powered assessment of the on-premise setup, they then used Terraform to meticulously construct the new cloud infrastructure. GANT’s SAP partner then seamlessly installed the SAP applications and migrated the database. The result? The familiar SAP system that GANT’s users rely on, now running in the cloud with enhanced performance and responsiveness.
Importantly, this transition had zero impact on the day-to-day experience of GANT’s end users. The SAP environments they interact with remained fundamentally unchanged, while behind the scenes, GANT now has a well-managed infrastructure that has never experienced any infrastructure failures since the project was completed. GANT now has a more cost-effective infrastructure that is easy to optimise and adapt to their needs.
The Result
This partnership has empowered GANT to achieve lasting IT improvements. Beyond optimising costs and streamlining infrastructure management, the company saw tangible results through the rapid deployment enabled by Stratozone and Terraform. These successes laid a strong foundation for GANT’s continued evolution within the cloud, positioning them to stay agile and scale their operations as the business demands.