Dimotrans Group
Sector
Activity
Dimotrans Group specializes in multimodal road, air, and maritime goods transportation, customs management, and custom B2B and B2C logistics. The company employs over 1,500 people at its sites in France and 15 other countries worldwide.
In 2019, Dimotrans Group achieved revenue of €365 million—almost double the figure it posted five years previously. Its buoyant performance can be attributed in part to a sustained external growth strategy. As the group has expanded through acquisitions, its information system has grown in complexity, with more than 25 business applications operating in many different environments—from legacy IBM Power i (AS/400) systems, to Windows, Citrix, VMware, and more. This aging architecture was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain—and to upgrade in order to improve availability, performance, and security.
In 2020, Dimotrans’ IT department decided to segment the information system around the group’s three core business lines for enhanced reliability, resilience, and agility. The company called in Hardis Group to define a target system architecture that would deliver on all fronts: high availability, performance, resilience to incidents, agility, security, and cost efficiency. In the end, Dimotrans opted for a multicloud (private and public), hyper-converged architecture, operating primarily under Nutanix, and managed and supervised by Hardis Group.
“Our hybrid, multicloud architecture will support our strong growth going forward and help us meet performance and operational efficiency imperatives across our group business lines. We’re ready to deploy new, value-creating digital tools and services.” — Franck Pallé, Chief Information Officer, Dimotrans Group
Project objectives
- To improve information system availability and performance
- To support the group’s ambitious growth plans
- To equip Dimotrans with a modern, reliable, and scalable information system
- To optimize interconnections with third-party applications (EDI, APIs, etc.)
- To establish clearly segmented business environments: road transportation, overseas (maritime and air transportation, and customs), and logistics
- To enhance data security and provide full traceability
- To keep IT costs under control
Work performed
- Reviewing the existing information system and defining a target architecture
- Implementing a segmented, hyper-converged infrastructure operating under Nutanix
- Deploying applications in a multicloud environment (private & AWS clouds, GCP)
- Migrating applications to the various cloud environments without service interruption
- Defining security governance rules
- Rolling out security-improvement tools: regular vulnerability scans, log management, patch management, etc.
- Deploying system supervision and operation tools: mapping, metrics, log management, supervisors, hypervisors, and dashboards
Bénéfices
- Résilience du SI grâce à la suppression des dépendances techniques entre les différentes applications métiers
- Système d’information segmenté, scalable et pérenne
- Amélioration de la disponibilité et des performances applicatives
- Garantie d’un socle système d’information bénéficiant toujours des dernières mises à jour
- Tableaux de bord et indicateurs partagés de pilotage de la santé du SI
- Accompagnement et services granulaires, en fonction des ressources et compétences internes à la DSI
- Augmentation des capacités de la DSI à se concentrer sur les activités plus proches du métier
- Agilité pour intégrer de nouvelles applications en cas de nouvelle acquisition
- Maîtrise des coûts IT, et notamment des services en Cloud public