Asia Pacific is the most crucial region for Panasonic, with operations in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines generating nearly 80% of the company’s revenues. But this booming geographical region was causing the company issues. Namely, business was growing too fast there to be handled by their existing CRM systems, which were based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. The business needed to update the ageing customer management tool, while at the same time tackle exploding data volumes and sky-high hosting costs.

Panasonic decided to upgrade from their on premise platform to a cloud platform to save on server hosting costs and simplify their infrastructure.

Panasonic engaged Avanade as the Microsoft experts to perform the system upgrade from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to CRM 2013 and migrate existing on premise servers (CRM, AX & SharePoint) to the Microsoft Azure cloud environment within eight months.

Avanade and Microsoft also implemented Remote Desktop services so that users could access AX applications in the cloud without any latency between the AX clients to the server. Previously this had been handled by a desktop subscription solution from Citrix, but with the new solution they are seeing a cost savings as well as the capability of having this function remotely.

In addition, Panasonic also leveraged Avanade to provide ongoing Managed Services to manage SMAP servers hosted on Azure.

The newly upgraded system enjoys faster performance of up to 46%, thanks to Avanade’s fine tuning and data housekeeping.

On top of that, Panasonic no longer needs to subscribe to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, as this is now replaced by Remote Application Services, which will help drastically cut down on costs.

Panasonic will also continue to see operations costs go down thanks to Microsoft Azure’s on-demand computing, instead of struggling with allocated costs upfront.