Automation is revolutionizing industries worldwide, and finance is no exception. Loomis, a global leader in cash-handling products and services, understands the power of automation to drive efficiency and innovation. With a rich 170-year history, Loomis, headquartered in Sweden and serving 27 countries, continues to evolve, embracing technology to optimize operations and maintain its competitive edge.
Technology modernization and automation across its international network of more than 400 branches in 20 countries presents unique challenges. And, with each subsidiary operating independently, using diverse technology stacks and licensing agreements, Loomis had a complex IT landscape.
Streamlining IT operations
Jean-Michel Blanc, group head of System Engineering, Loomis, explains: "Each Loomis subsidiary had its own data center with different technologies. We needed to streamline our IT operations and bring a consistent IT framework across our local subsidiary teams. In Europe alone we had 28 data centers, making consolidation a monumental task.”
Loomis set out to standardize its global IT platform. The company wanted a unified, highly automated solution that allowed local subsidiaries to operate and utilize IT infrastructure in a way that suited their specific needs, while also adhering to Loomis’s global standards and practices.
Creating a private cloud
Loomis decided to use VMware Cloud Foundation to transform its global data center infrastructure into a modern private cloud environment. Given that Loomis manages financial operations, there was no room for downtime during the transition—the migration process had to be seamless. “One of our main challenges was to ensure our local teams and the customers they support did not notice that we were making a change,” says Blanc.
The team successfully migrated to VMware Cloud Foundation and, as a result, Loomis achieved the scale and agility advantages of public cloud with the security and performance of private cloud.
Automating manual tasks
The high levels of automation brought by VMware Cloud Foundation aligned with the company’s commitment to efficiency. The solution empowered Blanc’s team to automate manual tasks through advanced workflows and agile templating. Despite the size and scale of the business, the global IT team at Loomis is relatively small so, beyond delivering a successful migration, it also needed to manage the private cloud on an ongoing basis.
“We really love automation,” says Blanc. “We are a global team, albeit a small global team, but we can handle this kind of private cloud with a low workload thanks to VMware Cloud Foundation.”
A cloud consumption experience with self-service automation
VMware Cloud Foundation also enabled the delivery of a cloud consumption experience with self-service automation for the subsidiaries. This new delivery model has empowered Loomis users to be more independent and productive while ensuring the security and compliance of their work.
“Having a self-service private cloud has completely changed the dynamics of our global IT set-up and has provided an ideal way for local teams to consume IT. We now offer infrastructure, network, applications and platform as a service,” says Blanc.
Accelerating innovation across the business
Loomis has seen significant growth of its Kubernetes environment, powered by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which Blanc asserts is accelerating innovations and improvements across the company: “We’ve had Kubernetes for two years now and it has become clear that more and more developers are consuming this particular environment. By providing this platform as a service, they are building and evolving the products and solutions that are driving the company forward.”
When reflecting on the recent cloud journey, Blanc can see many benefits to the Loomis business: “With VMware Cloud Foundation, we are faster to deploy and roll out new services and infrastructures. This has created an IT environment that continues to evolve at speed but also one that fosters innovation. It’s delivering real business improvement. We are more agile and can deliver services to our customers faster.”