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April 18, 2023

BÜCHI’s customer-centric vision accelerates innovation using Azure Integration Services

For the past 80 years, BÜCHI Labortechnik AG has put quality laboratory technology solutions into the hands of the world's top researchers, scientists, and manufacturers. Always innovating, BÜCHI is changing its business approach from the inside out in a digital transformation that connects customers in new ways, streamlines processes, and drives profits. A new strategy requires new tools, and the company is upgrading and replacing dozens of legacy business systems—a sweeping modernization effort that also means reevaluating hundreds of integration points across global information and communications technology (ICT) platforms.

Buchi Labortechnik

Integration is a key component of any digital transformation. Together with Microsoft Solutions Partner CloudFronts, BÜCHI deployed Azure Integration Services, a suite of tools designed to seamlessly integrate enterprise applications, data, and processes. Now BÜCHI can support real-time data exchange across multiple mission-critical systems, including Salesforce, SAP, Infor LN, and Akeneo. The new integration architecture pivots on Azure API Management, a hybrid, multicloud management platform for application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, Azure Service Bus provides reliable and scalable messaging infrastructure; Azure Functions supports scalable, serverless computing for transformation logic; and Azure Logic Apps orchestrates workflows and provides dedicated brokers. The solution keeps data in sync, reduces operational costs significantly, and enables developers to connect new apps faster—essential steps to realizing the full potential of BÜCHI’s customer vision.

“This project is all about how we can redefine the customer journey. We know we can grow with Azure Integration Services.”

Reto Hossmann, Global Head of ICT, BÜCHI Labortechnik AG

A Swiss innovator dreams up new business models

BÜCHI’s passion for quality and precise manufacturing is seen in everything from distillation apparatus to chromatography systems and spray dryers for micro particles. The company’s groundbreaking rotary evaporator launched in 1957 and is still a bestseller. Over the years, BÜCHI has kept its independent spirit and engineering focus, even as it has grown into a global technology leader.

Across industries, intelligent technology in physical products gives companies new types of information and rich data streams that make it possible to tackle complex challenges in fields such as health care. According to Reto Hossmann, BÜCHI Global Head of ICT, “The company’s success may have started with lab equipment, but in compliance with all data protection guidelines and transparency towards our customers, it is important to BÜCHI that we can create new business models that use all our data and aggregate best cases for our customers.”

Like any mature enterprise, BÜCHI pulls data from a variety of interconnected business systems acquired over time, spanning on-premises and cloud environments. These systems handle everything from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to customer relationship management (CRM) and smart device development. As part of the company’s digital transformation, the ICT team began adopting more flexible software as a service (SaaS) technologies, including popular Salesforce CRM and SAP ERP solutions. And they’re all integrated.

For example, if a customer asks for a product quote, the opportunity is created in Salesforce and, as soon as it is won, the quote data is sent to one of BÜCHI’s ERP systems, where the sales order is generated. Another example is the product information that appears on the BÜCHI sales website, courtesy of a product information management (PIM) system that is integrated with a digital asset management (DAM) system and Microsoft SharePoint. As the company adopts new and better systems, the ICT team must coordinate more than 60 interfaces across the company’s top 20 business applications. It takes time.

“Application integration is the backbone of any organization undergoing a digital transformation, and the same principle applied to BÜCHI,” explains Anil Shah, CloudFronts Chief Executive Officer (CEO). CloudFronts has earned multiple Solutions Partner designations from Microsoft for its work with Azure, data analytics, application development, and business applications. Together, BÜCHI and CloudFronts began evaluating off-the-shelf and custom integration as a platform options.

“We looked at several third-party solutions, but the upfront costs were too high—10 times more than we pay today,” says Pasquale Prudente, BÜCHI Lead Architect. “The beauty of Azure was using PaaS [platform as a service] and pay-as-you-go services. That was new for us.”

Hossmann agrees. “Other systems we evaluated were not really flexible, and I think that's the crucial point—that we could start small with Azure Integration Services and grow together.”

“Azure Integration Services gives organizations the flexibility to tailor their integration solutions to their needs, while keeping costs under control.”

Anil Shah, CEO, CloudFronts

“We can integrate everything”

Through the evaluation process, BÜCHI learned about different approaches to integration. With Azure Integration Services, Prudente recalls, “Everything was a fit. We realized that we wanted something script-based with support for C#, because then you can build your own logic and any transformations you want with great performance and native integration with other Azure services.”

The flexible, API-driven solution enables developers to easily connect and share data across on-premises and cloud systems. By managing APIs as first-class assets throughout their lifecycle, data stays in sync, developers can do their work more easily, and connected applications, web systems, and processes operate smoothly.

“We can integrate everything. That is the beauty of this solution,” Prudente remarks.

Managing and protecting APIs is the job of Azure API Management, a fully managed service for cataloging the company’s APIs. BÜCHI can expose services hosted on and outside of Azure as APIs and allow those APIs to be discovered and consumed by internal and external users. The complexity and diversity of the back-end systems remain hidden from the platform’s consumers and producers.

For added protection, BÜCHI configures Azure API Management to restrict direct access to all APIs and to apply security policies, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) validation and payload-based validations rules. Azure security features also help the company support ISO 27001 compliance for information security management systems.

BÜCHI gives its internal and external partners access to the API Management developer portal. Authorized users, including BÜCHI, CloudFronts, and partner developers, can discover the APIs through interactive documentation that provides code samples. The portal also enables developers to easily test their scripts.

“The developer portal makes the onboarding process much faster,” Shah notes. As an integration partner, CloudFronts also saw the benefits of built-in features like connectors that reduce time and effort for developers and accelerate time to market. “Azure Integration Services allows us to provide clients with a comprehensive integration platform, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty,” he adds.

Prudente agrees. “The partnership between BÜCHI and CloudFronts was one of the best parts of the project.”

The right integration architecture

BÜCHI and CloudFronts spent a month building a proof of concept. Prudente admits that learning a new approach to development “was a challenge.” But he acknowledges, “Afterwards, everything was much easier and faster to implement.” Since then, the teams have optimized the integration processes, enabling them to deliver interfaces of similar complexity within just three days.

The solution follows the reference architecture for enterprise integration using message broker and events. It supports asynchronous and synchronous interfaces—more than 60 active interfaces that facilitate the exchange of roughly 1 million requests per day, involving approximately 20 different business applications.

To orchestrate the on-demand and scheduled workflows, the team uses Azure Logic Apps, a leading integration platform as a service solution and a key component of Azure Integration Services. Logic Apps orchestrates workflows directly with back-end systems. It works like a broker in this system to emulate a producer application. For example, to completely refresh the data on the consumer side, all of a producer application’s data is needed. Instead of firing event-based triggers at the producer, the developers use Logic Apps to fetch all data from the producer and, for each record, pass a message to the API endpoints to queue and process the messages. By doing so, the developers can guarantee the same transformation logic.

“We appreciate Azure Logic Apps for its easy-to-use and scalable workflows with built-in connectors for creating on-demand and scheduled jobs,” observes Prudente. For example, the developers didn’t need to use the SharePoint connectors in C# as Logic Apps already provides everything, but they can easily replace the logic with custom connectors if needed in the future. The team used connectors to hook up services that handle HTTP requests and calls to Azure system components, such as Azure Files and Azure Storage.

Logic Apps offers more than 900 connectors, but BÜCHI and CloudFronts also created custom connectors to handle real-time scenarios. As Prudente points out, “For some applications, like Salesforce, we want to write our own logic and do complex transformations. Azure gives us the flexibility to change and adapt. You can really build something that’s yours—and we do not depend on updates from third parties.”

Asynchronous, event-driven workflows follow the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) eventing model in Azure Event Grid. Its high-performance transactions exchange data between BÜCHI systems in milliseconds. An application or service can publish events, and any interested subscribers are notified—without polling or scheduling tasks. Azure Service Bus serves as the message broker, helping to further decouple applications—a particular advantage for the file-based systems still in use at BÜCHI.

“We now have a centralized logic only for integration,” says Prudente. “We have a highly complex environment, and with Azure Integration Services, we get the flexibility to make the changes we want as we find the right architecture for us. We can switch an interface or replace an application really quickly. That’s the beauty of Azure Integration Services.”

The BÜCHI integration platform uses Azure Integration Services to facilitate the exchange of roughly 1 million requests per day, involving approximately 20 different business applications.

End-to-end Azure services

To quickly deploy and manage interfaces, BÜCHI and CloudFronts built in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and automation using Azure DevOps. The teams can automate builds, tests, and deployments through the CI/CD pipeline and manage repositories and artifacts associated with Azure resources.

“This allows us to move faster and more efficiently, delivering new features and functionality to our users more quickly and often,” Hossmann reports.

Deployment is only one end of the solution. On the other end is monitoring. “What I really like about Azure is the monitoring,” Prudente remarks. Azure Monitor collects and aggregates the data from every layer and component of BÜCHI’s system into a common data platform. BÜCHI and CloudFronts can analyze and query logs, application performance, and other key health indicators provided by Log Analytics and Application Insights, two popular features of Azure Monitor. BÜCHI also tracks expenses closely and created a monitoring system based on Microsoft Cost Management.

“Initially, it was shocking to me how much information was available,” Prudente shares. To navigate and make sense of all that data, he does what any developer would do—he writes code. The team uses Kusto Query Language to identify patterns and pinpoint any anomalies across BÜCHI’s entire Azure landscape. In addition, BÜCHI built an alert system based on the criticality of an event. Using Azure Monitor action groups, the team gets informed of issues, categorized by severity, in real time. Action groups define the actions to be taken for each severity category and automate the response. “We can send emails and SMS messages, perform voice calls, trigger logic apps, execute runbooks in Azure Automation, and much more,” Prudente adds.

The solution architecture incorporates several other Azure services. Azure Virtual Network connects the solution to on-premises data. Azure Files provides cloud-scale file shares. Global variables are stored in Azure App Configuration. And sensitive data and security keys are stored in Azure Key Vault, while log attachments and orchestration control logics are cached in an Azure Storage account.

Hossmann points out the advantages of using all these managed Azure services. “Azure Integration Services is PaaS, giving organizations like ours the flexibility to partially or fully implement the solution architecture based on our specific requirements—without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.”

A flexible Azure stack for the future

Like the rotary evaporator that continues to help labs run, BÜCHI has once again streamlined productivity across a range of applications. This time, Azure Integration Services is helping BÜCHI connect systems faster and ultimately dream up the next web, mobile, machine learning, and IoT innovations for its customers.

The advantages extend to BÜCHI’s partner, CloudFronts. As Shah points out, “Azure Integration Services offers a cost-effective solution for organizations of all sizes. It’s an affordable and accessible option for our clients.”

As BÜCHI anticipates future opportunities for its customers, it sees Microsoft as a progressive partner. “AI is a big topic right now,” Hossmann mentions. “We know that we can grow together with Azure Integration Services.”

The choice to grow with Microsoft has another benefit. As Prudente relates, “When we started to work with Azure Integration Services, our management understood why. Following this path with Microsoft supports our strategy to digitalize the customer journey, lab workflows, and internal processes to create additional customer value and further drive efficiency.” He mentions that the move to cloud services has also had a positive personal impact, motivating him to pursue Azure certifications.

BÜCHI’s digital transformation benefits from the global reach of Azure, an important consideration, since 97 percent of its sales come from abroad.

“It’s quite important for us as a global IT provider to support strong platforms,” Hossmann concludes. “That’s why we moved everything to Azure.”

“We have a highly complex environment, and with Azure Integration Services, we get the flexibility to make the changes we want as we find the right architecture for us.”

Pasquale Prudente, Lead Architect, BÜCHI Labortechnik AG

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