Ricoh Singapore Drives Innovation, Flexibility, and Cost Savings by Migrating Windows Workloads to AWS

Ricoh has been an innovator in office equipment since its founding in 1936. Today, the company is one of the world’s top manufacturers of office automation equipment, producing everything from digital copiers and printers to scanners and digital imaging systems. To support expansion into the Asia-Pacific region, Ricoh launched Ricoh Singapore Pte. Ltd. in 1995.

Ricoh Singapore offers product demonstrations in showrooms or at customer sites to trial the company’s software and other products as part of its sales process. The organization relied on a Windows-based on-premises IT environment to support these live demos, which had become challenging as the infrastructure became older and more difficult and expensive to maintain. “Our hardware was nearing end of life, and we had experienced some downtime and higher costs,” says Adrian Lim, head of IT at Ricoh Singapore. The company also sought to deliver demos remotely as the world began working from home in the last few years and customers could no longer travel to showrooms. “We couldn’t meet customers in person for demos, so we had to set up virtual machines for customers or ship hardware to them and collect it and reformat the software when the demos were completed,” Lim explains. “We wanted the flexibility to do everything online.”

Additionally, Ricoh Singapore wanted to free up IT resources to create new applications and software features to support the company’s increasing focus on innovation. “To address our challenges, we decided it was a good time to move the demo environment to the cloud,” says Lim.

Ricoh Singapore had already started moving to the cloud, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support various workloads. The company decided to expand its AWS environment and began working with Lumen, an AWS Partner and IT solutions and managed services provider for global organizations. “We’re using mainly Windows-based applications, and we needed someone to advise us on moving those to AWS. Lumen was the right partner,” says Lim. Ignatius Wong, director of product management for hybrid cloud and IT solutions at Lumen Asia Pacific, adds, “We knew it was important to address Ricoh’s technical and business requirements for scalability and flexibility.”

Lumen worked closely with Ricoh Singapore to create a discovery assessment process to analyze workloads. For Ricoh Singapore, there had to be no business impact on customers during the cloud migration. “Our customer demos are an essential part of our sales process, so we can’t afford to lose a sales opportunity because of downtime,” says Lim.

In addition to assisting in migrating the Ricoh Singapore data center to AWS, Lumen is providing cloud consulting and managed cloud services. Lumen designed a proof of concept (POC) for a solution running on AWS, which gave Ricoh Singapore the confidence to migrate the production demo service application environment to AWS, running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Microsoft Windows Server instances. Lumen also deployed Cloud Application Manager (CAM), Lumen’s cloud orchestration service. CAM provides a centralized platform to give Ricoh Singapore more control and agility for its production environment. “CAM gives customers a single pane of glass to streamline AWS environment management,” says Wong.

Working with Lumen, Ricoh Singapore migrated its product demo application environment to AWS in under six months, ahead of schedule, without affecting customers or sales. “Our customers didn’t even realize we migrated the environment to AWS because demo performance was unaffected. We had zero complaints,” says Lim. “The migration was simple, and Lumen went above and beyond in terms of their support."

By migrating to AWS, Ricoh Singapore gained the flexibility to accommodate its customers that require remote product demos. “We don’t have to buy servers to keep the demo environment running at all times anymore,” says Lim. “AWS gives us the reliability to ensure our sales teams can run product demos from anywhere. We also have more flexibility. When customers want to install software on an older Windows environment, we can replicate that on AWS rather than reformatting the software or hardware."

Ricoh Singapore is focusing more on business innovation than IT management by migrating to AWS. “Using AWS, we have reduced the management burden on IT because we no longer need to manage on-premises hardware,” says Lim. “One full-time person now does the work of three full-time employees. This means we can spend our time on innovation instead of mundane IT tasks.”

For example, the company is creating new apps and features for customers, such as a newly launched customer relationship management (CRM) application. “When we create projects like our CRM solution, we simply need to launch new Amazon EC2 instances and experiment to see if everything works in development before moving to production,” says Lim.

Since migrating its demo environment to AWS, Ricoh Singapore has achieved a double-digit percentage decrease in operating costs. The company can now build a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to improve application development processes. “We expect to see more savings as we continue growing our AWS environment overall,” Lim concludes. “Our company is growing and expanding our product portfolio, and AWS and Lumen will help us support that growth.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/cloud-migration.