Oetiker is a supplier of sophisticated fastening solutions for the automotive industry as well as for high-quality applications in various industries and is a global leader in clamping and fastening solutions. Founded in 1942 in Horgen, Switzerland, the Oetiker Group supplies customers in over 70 countries.
Oetiker develops, produces and distributes clamps, rings and quick connectors as well as the associated assembly solutions. Oetiker is a privately owned company with more than 1400 employees worldwide at over 20 locations in Europe, Asia and America.
After an internal restructuring, Oetiker wanted to move its existing on-premise instances to the Atlassian Cloud in order to simplify administration processes and modernize the setup. catworkx successfully carried out the cloud assessment and cloud migration for Jira Software and Confluence in the company in 2021.
As a long-standing catworkx customer, Oetiker approached catworkx in March 2021 with the desire to move its on-premise instances to the Atlassian Cloud in order to simplify administration processes and modernize the setup. It was primarily for strategic reasons that Oetiker wanted to rely more on SaaS solutions, as they no longer wanted to administer the tools themselves. The company's previous instances were installed locally on a single server and maintenance took up a lot of resources internally. There were now performance problems with the "historically grown setup" and updates were needed to bring it up to date. There was also a need for action with regard to the reverse proxy server used, which was no longer being further developed by the manufacturer. A redesign of the system landscape was urgently overdue. The company needed 100 users for Jira Software and 250 for Confluence.
Oetiker's main requirements were to migrate the existing setup to the cloud as quickly as possible. It was also important to increase the number of users and expand applications that had already been implemented on the server but were still experimental, such as reserving machines and test equipment via Jira tickets.
catworkx started at the beginning of 2021 - together with the IT management of Oetiker - with an inventory of the current environment. The kick-off meeting for the cloud migration took place in March 2021. In a smart assessment, questions were asked about the goals Oetiker wanted to achieve by moving to the cloud, what the setup looks like today and what it should look like tomorrow. They were also asked about further expansion requirements and the technical prerequisites. In addition: which products would the company like to migrate and what requirements there are in terms of security, legal, compliance and data protection. What time frame does the company envisage and can some data be migrated now or later? The results from this round provided the necessary measures and the schedule to ensure that the cloud migration can be successfully completed: A roadmap for the cloud migration was drawn up.
This was followed by workshops with the management and the responsible employees who work with the system. After the workshop phase, the results were summarized and the migration concept was created. This included the following points:
The next step was the test migration. A test migration has the advantage that the employees can first test the new environment in peace and quiet and thus get used to the cloud. The Oetiker employees had a total of two weeks to test the new system and put it through its paces before the productive, final migration was due: in one day, all of Oetiker's content was migrated 1:1 from Jira Software and Confluence to the cloud. This had the positive effect of significantly increasing the number of application users over time. Another advantage: problems during operation, such as occasional outages or the need to restart instances, were now a thing of the past. A new solution for internal resource planning based on the BigPicture extension could also be put into operation.
The migration of Jira Software and Confluence to the cloud not only provided the company with a higher level of IT security, but also improved usability. Applications are now more accessible and, above all, more stable and can be used with mobile apps without any problems. While the tools were previously only used by individual teams (in Switzerland) in the organization on a small scale, the cloud migration made it possible to expand their use to other organizational units and countries.