Indesso reduces IT maintenance costs by 45% with Red Hat

Indesso is a manufacturer of ingredients for food, flavor, and fragrance based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indesso relied on third-party providers to support its IT needs, but grew dissatisfied with high hardware and maintenance costs. As continuous investment in technology and process improvement are central tenets of its business strategy, the company sought a more cost-effective, efficient solution. To reduce IT costs and improve performance, Indesso deployed its SAP application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Benefits

• Reduced IT maintenance costs by 45% and hardware costs by 65%
• Achieved high availability with more robust disaster recovery
• Eliminated need for vendor support, improving operational efficiency and issue resolution

Established in 1968, Indesso has grown from a local clove leaf oil producer to a national market leader in aromatic ingredients, food ingredients, flavor, and fragrance. As the company has grown, it has increasingly looked to expand its global business by partnering with international suppliers. Its success has led to being recognized by Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade as the country’s best-performing exporter for the past six years.

However, after Indesso grew large enough to deploy enterprise IT infrastructure, it found that the UNIX operating system and server hardware used to run its SAP application became too costly to maintain.

“Although our environment was quite stable, we didn’t have enough in-house expertise to maintain the system efficiently,” said Bagus Dwi Laksono, IT Manager, at Indesso. “We had to rely on support from the vendor, resulting in costs equivalent to an additional three to four new servers a year. It was clear we needed to start looking for a more affordable solution.”

Additionally, as its  business became increasingly reliant on data, Indesso sought to evolve to more reliable, paperless operations while also meeting International Organization for Standardization (ISO) data guidelines.

Trusted provider offers a cost-effective SAP infrastructure solution After carefully assessing Windows- and Linux-based platforms, Indesso chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system for its new SAP machine platform, running on an Intel x86 server. The company had previously succeeded using the platform to run its Alfresco document management system (DMS). 

“Any new solution would have to meet significant criteria,” said Bagus. “We would need to be satisfied in terms of ease of use, ease of maintenance, cost-efficiency, and stability” said Bagus.“Red Hat met all of the requirement criteria, and our IT team was more familiar with the Red Hat platform.” 

Indesso also deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On. This add-on enhances the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by reducing downtime and preventing single points of failure. It also isolates unresponsive applications to prevent corruption of critical enterprise data.

Achieved faster issue resolution

The ease of use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped Indesso reduce system complexity, compared to the company’s previous UNIX software. Indesso’s IT team can now complete its own maintenance and repair tasks to quickly resolve any system issues. 

“Our IT team can now troubleshoot issues in the system immediately,” said Bagus. “We can deal with problems faster to improve IT performance and operational efficiency.”

Reduced IT maintenance and hardware costs 

By eliminating the need for vendor support, Indesso has reduced its IT maintenance costs by 45%. In addition, the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run on a variety of industry-standard hardware options has helped Indesso cut its hardware costs by 65%.

“Red Hat made it possible to replace our previous high-cost technology with a more recognized, affordable solution that improves our efficiency,” said Bagus. “When we wanted to replace our existing server with a less-expensive option, we were easily able to continue running our Red Hat environment.”

Improved availability and stability

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On, Indesso has minimized system downtime. Eliminating any single point of failure means Indesso can failover to a different server as needed to ensure its services remain available to internal users and customers.

“We’re in a far stronger position in terms of disaster recovery,” said Bagus. “With the previous solution, we had only one server. Although the server’s performance was outstanding, it was very vulnerable to risk. Now, with several servers running the High Availability Add-On, Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us keep business processes run smoothly and continuously.”

As Indesso continues to expand its business internationally, it plans to use the operational budget surplus generated from migrating to the Red Hat solution to invest in other innovative technology, such as Red Hat Virtualization.

“We saw how Red Hat helped us solve one problem in our business, and we’ve been considering what other solutions from Red Hat could be implemented for future benefits,” said Bagus.