e-BO case study
STG Group
Merging three IT domains into one resilient private cloud
At a glance:
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Market : Wholesale
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Scope : Merge three IT domains into one private cloud-based landscape, including ERP and transport management
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Mission: Build a secure, future-ready IT backbone, enabling IT to focus on business value, and users to work more efficiently across sites
The challenge
STG Group, Belgium’s leading sanitary, heating and plumbing wholesaler, part of the BME Group, operates 55 pro-shops, 23 showrooms, a highly automated distribution center and 2 transport hub locations.
The merger of Sax, Lambrechts and Schrauwen left STG with three separate IT domains, each with its own infrastructure, applications, and data. This fragmentation created inefficiency and limited scalability, forcing IT to maintain three environments instead of one.
“If you manage 300 servers instead of 100, that has a real workload impact,” says Glenn Bruyninckx, Director IT & Digital. “More importantly, we needed one ERP, one transport management system, one set of processes. To get there, we needed a strong infrastructure foundation.”
STG wanted IT to focus less on infrastructure and more on business value. Security, efficiency and speed were key, and the migration had to be fast and seamless. Later, the companies Induscabel, Sanidel and Paepens were added step by step, showing the scalability of the approach.
The solution
STG partnered with e-BO Enterprises to consolidate the three domains into one. The program was set up as a greenfield project: a completely new environment built from scratch, instead of patching legacy systems together. The solution combined:
Private cloud
A robust private cloud, hosted in e-BO’s geographically dispersed EU datacenters.
Secure tenant environment
A secure tenant environment with firewalls, vulnerability management, patching and data deduplication across two datacenters for maximum resilience.
Centralized virtual desktop
As part of the new application landscape, e-BO also deployed a centralized virtual desktop environment that gives STG employees secure, uniform access to business-critical applications from any location.
The implementation
The migration was executed in three phases:
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Consolidate: Merge legacy environments into one private cloud.
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Build new (in parallel): Deploy a modern application landscape, including ERP, to provide a consistent digital workspace for all users.
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Decommission: Gradually phase out legacy systems, moving fully to the new stack.
Despite the complexity of merging three datacenters and changing ERP systems at the same time, the transformation was completed in 18 months, with minimal business impact.
“The fact that we had almost no downtime during such a big transformation is a real achievement,” notes Glenn Bruyninckx. “For IT, it was a complete shift to a much stronger backbone.”
The results
The new IT backbone delivers value at multiple levels:
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For IT teams: Simplified management, proactive monitoring and less time spent firefighting.
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For end users: Faster access to applications and one unified environment, making daily work more efficient.
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For the business: A scalable, secure foundation that enables digital growth and process standardization.
Looking forward, STG sees potential in extending the partnership with e-BO into OT security and support, to protect the company’s highly automated logistics center and future-proof its operations even further.
Bruyninckx summarizes: “Thanks to e-BO, we now have a resilient infrastructure that lets our IT team focus on business value instead of infrastructure. It’s a future-proof setup that supports both efficiency today and growth tomorrow.”
Why e-BO Enterprises?
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Proven expertise in merging multiple IT domains into one landscape.
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Private cloud expertise with redundancy across datacenters.
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Ability to deliver under a strict deadline.
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Partnership approach with weekly service delivery meetings to stay aligned.