Eplan Data Portal—previously hosted on servers in Germany—has now migrated to the Microsoft Azure Platform. Due to its exponential growth in the last years, the previous deployed solution had reached its limits.

Explaining the decision to switch to Azure, Global Director Eplan Data Portal Stefan Domdey said: “Looking ahead to our international growth, we wanted to find an efficient, highly scalable cloud solution that we could implement quickly. Our goal was to have the same opportunities as we have in Germany in markets such as Asia and the US, and to provide data centrally in various data centers around the world.”

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Eplan was keeping an eye on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform right from the start. The company further opted for Noxum GmbH when it came to planning and implementing its cloud strategy.

Project implementation was fast thanks to Azure’s open nature. First, the local on-premise infrastructure was mapped to Azure as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Then the system components were replaced with Azure services. Eplan sees the main advantage of Azure in its central administration and simple provision of complex and highly available applications and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in various data centres around the world. This added value is given a boost by numerous Azure services. For example, Eplan is currently in the process of implementing Azure Content Delivery Network (Azure CDN), which offers useful APIs and tools for developing global applications. In future, the world of possibilities available through Azure services and the platform as a whole will be captured in full in the ongoing development of Eplan Data Portal.

The growth of Eplan Data Portal—one of the largest and most detailed online platforms with standardized downloads of parts master data, including engineering information from many component manufacturers —means that the sky’s the limit technologically. Currently around 700,000 device data plus 1.2 million variants by way of configuration are available through the portal. A hallmark of the portal’s high acceptance among users is the 179 component manufacturers from around the world and an average of about 1,000,000 device downloads monthly.

EPLAN
www.eplan.de