Rio Tinto is a global mining and metals company.
We operate out of the majority of the continents of the globe except for Antarctica.
Our purpose is as pioneers in mining and metals,
we produce materials essential for human progress.
A few years ago we undertook digital transformation across our business
particularly focused on our enterprise systems.
The intent was to deliver a more seamless set of solutions to our customers.
We believe that Accenture and Microsoft together offered us the best long-term options.
Their extensive ecosystem in place really has come together to deliver a solid set of outcomes.
In 2015 Rio Tinto selected Accenture to be their partner to drive
the transformation and migration of their existing enterprise IT services
from on premise data centers to a cloud based everything as a service model
and the most significant part of that move was the migration of the SAP and associated systems.
This is the largest public cloud implementation of SAP
so the technical teams were really breaking new ground as they went.
That was a significant piece of work to migrate that
within a time frame.
SAP for us is mission critical.
We have 40,000 users, 365 day a year operation, it's 24 by 7.
We use SAP for every aspect of our business.
If SAP was to stop, we would not be able to send goods to our customers.
Our SAP footprint is very wide.
We do run all the traditional type processes on it;
finance, procurement, sales, maintenance.
Being an asset intensive industry so our work management is on SAP.
We've got two major environments.
One environment is 8 terabytes in database size.
The other environment is about 7.5 terabytes.
The metrics that we measure is availability of those environments
at 99.5% availability on the Azure platform.
We use Azure for more than just SAP.
It is used across our enterprise suite of products, we use it for our collaboration tools,
it's used to support many of our thousands of applications we run on behalf of the business.
We make use of Azure every day.
Having Azure as the key platform, as we go through business requirements,
whether it's SAP or otherwise, we always look to Azure as the first point of hosting it.
You can spin something up quickly but you can also spin something down quickly, reducing costs.
That's something that is very, very positive from cost saving.
Not even a few minutes of outage disrupts our business.
The reliability of Azure has allowed us to continue with those requirements and meet our business needs.
Azure is certainly a technology that we are looking at taking more advantage of as a company.
