Van Havermaet scales up innovation to deliver superior accounting advice with Azure Stack HCI

Architecting for innovation

Van Havermaet had historically run its workloads and applications on-premises, and for the past decade on VMware ESX. As its on-premises systems matured, Van Havermaet faced the dilemma of whether to buy new hardware that would also require eventual replacement. Alternatively, the company could pivot to a cloud solution that offers scalable compute and storage, putting Van Havermaet in a position to begin innovating and differentiating itself from its competitors. Additionally, the company’s on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which Van Havermaet and its clients still used, needed to remain online a little longer.

Requiring a hybrid solution, greater capacity and scale without more capital investments, a backup and disaster recovery plan, and a relatively quick and seamless migration, the company turned to Azure Stack HCI. With a hyperconverged infrastructure, Van Havermaet could modernize its architecture, consolidate and run virtualized production workloads from anywhere, and increase efficiency, performance, and security—all while bringing its on-premises environment as close to Azure as possible.

Van Havermaet worked with 3-it to find the right solution and plan the integration. Over a long weekend after a few months of preparation, Van Havermaet deployed its new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) environment: a two-node cluster that’s sized to meet its on-premises requirements. The company uses Azure Arc as a unified management platform to centrally manage and monitor its hybrid environment of on-premises and Azure cloud services. 

“Azure Stack HCI helped us quickly and easily integrate the cloud into our current environment,” recalls Benny Westaedt, Chief Information Officer at Van Havermaet. “And with frequent updates, it’s improving every few weeks—it’s a platform that grows with us.”

In support of its solution, Van Havermaet uses Azure Databricks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup (making use of Azure redundancies to help maintain reliability), Veeam backup repositories (running in Azure for archiving purposes), and Azure Blob Storage and Azure SQL for disk storage. 

Additionally, Van Havermaet plans to deploy Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure AI services on Azure Stack HCI in the coming months. Van Havermaet will use local Azure Stack HCI to train and test AI models, and do the same with AKS to manage applications. “We can use Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI to keep sensitive customer data and applications on-premises while gaining the scale and automation of Kubernetes for container management,” Westaedt says. “With AKS on Azure Stack HCI, we can orchestrate both our cloud-based and on-premises containers with one platform so we can develop applications on AKS and deploy them unchanged on-premises."

Scaling up to better service

With the capacity, scale, and enhanced compute it’s built with Azure Stack HCI and other Azure resources, Van Havermaet is developing three key platforms that enable a whole new level of innovative customer service offerings that create greater value for itself and its clients. The first is a customer portal built on SharePoint Online that functions as a document management system. Each of the company’s customers has its own version of the document management system—roughly 12,000 iterations—where they can store and access corporate documents and private investments. Van Havermaet plans to expand this solution to accommodate from 10 to 20 million documents in the coming years, and it hopes to develop AI and simulation capabilities to better manage the documents and unlock value for clients.

Van Havermaet is developing a second platform to help customers manage their ERP workloads, with the expectation of running approximately 5,000 ERP instances. The third solution in development is an operational data-streaming platform that will pull data from Van Havermaet, customers, and government sites and systems to provide Van Havermaet and its clients with up-to-the-minute data and insights.

“None of this could be done without Azure Stack HCI,” says Westaedt. “Having to build every piece of infrastructure can be a major limitation on innovation. We’re able to do things now we weren’t able to do six months ago. We can digitize and grow, and we can also help our customers do the same.”

Van Havermaet found the high availability and functionality it needed to develop these solutions through Azure Stack HCI—it gained the scale and compute required for solutioning without having to manage its own local development and storage environments.

A market differentiator

Van Havermaet can continue delivering best-in-class accounting and financial advice, and it can now offer innovative value through co-creation with its customers. Collaborating with clients to develop the solutions they need is a win for Van Havermaet because it not only finds success for one client, but it’s developing strategies and solutions that it can broadly apply to its own business. Van Havermaet is gaining the centralized management it needs to do this with Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc. ”Giving the right advice, looking at the right systems, and co-developing with our customers and suppliers is the business of the future,” says Westaedt. “Co-creation makes us and our customers stronger, and it’s also really fun.”

Indeed, Van Havermaet is now capable of providing more holistic IT solutions to its clients, empowering them to focus on their core businesses. And the scale that the company now offers means that it can assume bigger, more complex workloads from clients, thereby reducing their IT burdens. “As we continue running client business applications, they have less need for IT knowledge, and within five years, lots of our customers won’t require the same IT footprint they have had to carry,” says Westaedt. “With Azure Stack HCI, we can assume client IT burdens, like ERP and data management, and ensure the functionality of their various platform integrations, which lets them focus on their businesses.”

The cloud is the limit

For Van Havermaet, Azure is opening new avenues for innovation, and new opportunities to deliver winning accounting and financial services to its clients. The architecture that it’s implemented with Azure Stack HCI and its cloud integration is the foundation it needs to support and lead clients for years to come.

“Because I no longer need to fix current problems with old technology, I can focus on solving the business problems of tomorrow,” Westaedt concludes. “We use Azure Stack HCI to handle our basic infrastructure needs so we can focus on innovation.”

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