Case Study: Brazilian real estate company rebuilds for greater security and ease with SAP on Microsoft Azure
March 26, 2019
Tegra Incorporadora is a homebuilder and residential real estate company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a subsidiary of Canadian company Brookfield Asset Management. When Tegra evaluated the expense and drawbacks of its infrastructure, especially in light of its critical SAP systems, one solution for addressing its issues stood out: move to Microsoft Azure. Not only did the company gain the cost-saving flexibility and scalability it needed to prosper, but it also uses Microsoft services for easier system management and gathering and sharing valuable insights into its business.
These days, we need to be much more agile and have innovative solutions. We’ve achieved this with our shift to Azure. It brings us flexibility, economy, innovation, and a great deal of agility.
Dado Amaral: IT General Manager
Tegra Incorporadora
Tegra Incorporadora has been building, buying, and selling homes in Brazil for 40 years. The company has more than 78 million square feet built or under construction in more than 93,000 properties. Tegra relies on a set of critical systems, such as SAP, that it cannot afford to have offline. “These systems perform all our administrative and management tasks,” says Dado Amaral, IT General Manager at Tegra Incorporadora. “We keep all the purchase orders, requests, construction plans, and client contacts and relationships in one system or another.”
The company used a hosting service to house all its systems, but that solution was failing, according to Maurício Baise, IT Infrastructure Manager at Tegra Incorporadora. “The old datacenter relied on virtual machines prone to running out of memory,” he says. The setup was cumbersome, demanding two to three weeks of preplanning for any changes, and extremely expensive. And once deployed, storage could not be rolled back, regardless of usage.
Creating a scalable infrastructure
Tegra moved to Microsoft Azure and revolutionized its IT structure, maximizing scalability and flexibility—at a fraction of the cost of the former system. Baise particularly values the convenience of managing every aspect of the environment in the Azure cloud portal. “From the portal, I can see how much memory and disk each machine is consuming, so I can develop a capacity plan to increase or decrease storage. When I consider how easy it is to turn off a machine and no longer be charged, or to upload a machine and use it for a few hours, the Azure subscription cost is minimal,” he says.
Amaral underscores the advantages of scalability and flexibility—essential in today’s business world. “These days, we need to be much more agile and have innovative solutions. We’ve achieved this with our shift to Azure. It brings us flexibility, economy, innovation, and a great deal of agility.”
Concerned about migrating its SAP systems to the cloud, Tegra engaged specialist Basis Solutions, a Microsoft Partner Network member. “SAP conversion to Azure has been in high demand by clients recently,” says Basis consultant Flávio Batista. “With Azure, the machines are frequently updated. When we undergo a migration process, we see a performance gain due to the advance in technology and elastic infrastructure.”
BHS Axter, another Tegra partner and member of the Microsoft Partner Network, oversaw infrastructure and connectivity, ensuring that simultaneous operation would continue throughout the migration. The partner used Azure ExpressRoute for uninterrupted communication and to prevent issues with availability or latency. With ExpressRoute, private connections transmit data directly between systems rather than via the internet. The data was transmitted to Microsoft SQL Server while the application systems were migrated to run on Windows Server in Azure.
Keeping the benefits coming
With its migration to a 100 percent Microsoft environment, Tegra shifted to a highly secure, agile environment with numerous tools to accelerate its effectiveness, like using Azure Backup to reduce data restoration time and reliability challenges. “Besides the resources native to Azure Backup, we created a more tailored and flexible solution for the database,” says BHS Axter Manager Luciano Bernardes. “Tegra has elevated its operations with this solution.”
Tegra embraced additional tools such as Microsoft Power BI, which further stimulated the dissemination of strategic information within the company, including between its São Paulo head office and headquarters in Canada. Tegra Systems Manager Alexandro Coelho found valuable insights—and efficiencies. “With Power BI, we carried out a project with our Canadian holding company and everyone had access to key information in real time,” he says.
Coelho also appreciated that the company’s move to the cloud went unnoticed. “The best news we received about the migration to Azure was—no news,” he continues. “No user complaints. No one noticed when we restructured machines, reducing their number. It was a smooth migration with no impact to our end customers.”
Adds Bira Freitas, Chief Executive Officer at Tegra Incorporadora, “Surrounding ourselves with partners at the level and standard of Microsoft is not only a privilege for us, but also something we focus on and want to do. Our company needs to act in the short term and plan for the future. We have to work with people who also plan 10, 15, 20, or 50 years ahead.”
Find out more about Tegra Incorporadora on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
The best news we received about the migration to Azure was—no news. No user complaints. No one noticed when we restructured machines, reducing their number. It was a smooth migration with no impact to our end customers.
Alexandro Coelho: Systems Manager
Tegra Incorporadora
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