Van Moer is an integrated logistical group with a focus on transport, distribution, warehousing and storage. Jo Van Moer started the company on his own in 1990 and has since grown the company to a group of over 1100 employees, 380 trucks, 400.000 square meter of warehouse space and more than €130 millions of revenue.  Van Moer has twenty sites combined, located in Belgium and Romania. The company grew massively in 2012. “We were mainly working from two sites in the port of Antwerp”, says ICT manager Joris Emmanuel. All applications were running from the group’s data center: from email to finances, from WMS to the planning of transports.

From on-premise to the cloud

Van Moer renewed the data center’s hardware every five years. “When it was time to upgrade the old system again, we looked at a different solution” says Joris Emmanuel. With regards to the network connection there was room for a lot of improvement in Zwijndrecht. The continuity of the power supply of the data center also needed upgrading. Joris Emmanuel stated that “it was hard to find a data center that would meet the needs of this growing company for longer than five years.At the time we were still working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, of which we knew the support would end.” Instead of investing in the extension of a new on-premise data center, Van Moer decided to change the ICT policy. “We chose for the cloud. We wanted a future-proof and scalable ICT environment that would support the growth of the company” says Jo Van Moer. He decided to end the old data center and contacted Uptime Group, that has a specific expertise center for cloud-based solutions.

Scalable and limitless

One of the biggest challenges at Van Moer was the support of their mail system since the mail server needed replacing. At a time where new locations and sites were added to the Van Moer portfolio, it was clear that it was difficult to predict the necessary size of a new mail server. Van Moer decided to upgrade to Microsoft 365. “The cloud expert center within Uptime Group prepared the migration and did the necessary tests.” Says Joris Emmanuel. After the successful migration of about fifty mailboxes, we were able to continue the work ourselves. Today we have over 350 accounts on Microsoft 365 and are able to add more without any issue as the company’s growing.”

Those who are too cautious about the future might choose for a solution that will not work for a very long time. “An on-premise server for emails didn’t seem the right option for us anymore.” Explains Joris Emmanuel. “Even managed hosting wasn’t on the table anymore. With Office 365 we’re choosing for a Software as a Service (SaaS).” The Romanian offices from Van Moer are also using Office 365. “It’s an easy-to-use system” says IT Infrastructure Manager Stijn Spooren. “We don’t have to worry about available disk space or having to archive. Everything happens automatically in the cloud. Email has become a task for the administrator and isn’t a technical issue anymore.”.