PUMA changes the game and speeds up data transfers with Azure Virtual WAN

Since its 1948 founding in Herzogenaurach, Germany, PUMA has been all about speed. The company became one of the world’s leading sportswear brands by emulating the traits of the stellar athletes who use its products: bravery, confidence, determination, and joy in competition. With €5.23 billion in sales in 2020 from its iconic PUMA sportswear and shoes plus its stichd and Cobra brands, PUMA has a position to protect. And the company runs on connected collaboration because of its enterprise locations around the world. As its namesake creature knows, speed without focus won’t win the day. That’s why PUMA centers the networking aspect of its well-laid plan on Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN.

Making the change from legacy on-premises to cloud agility

Always vigilant for new technologies, PUMA is focused on ways to elevate the speed and ease of global collaboration. Communications between its various locations had become both complex and slow, with the additional burden of pricey Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) lines to connect far-flung offices. PUMA used about 1,500 VPN tunnels to connect a mere 100 locations—an artifact of its previous environment, which required any-to-any communication.

This wasn’t conducive to speed. “We solved intercontinental connectivity challenges for our locations swiftly,” says Fabian Hausner, Team Lead for IT Future Service Delivery at PUMA. “That’s how we help the business to be the fastest sports brand.” PUMA’s IT team envisioned a solution that would lend itself to rapid deployment and ongoing agility for the company’s employees. It replaced the previous environment by rolling out Microsoft 365 in 2015, which was part of the PUMA IT Foundation’s program to re-architect its environment and the beginning the company’s cloud journey with Azure.

PUMA now maintains an extensive Azure environment with infrastructure stretching to six major Azure regions. The company has its main IT hubs in its three principal datacenters in Herzogenaurach, Boston, and Hong Kong. Connecting those hubs with traditional WAN lines couldn’t deliver the performance that PUMA sought because the company had no control over the lines.

In its search for a more flexible solution to connect the enterprise, PUMA’s IT team wanted simplicity. Its goal was to reduce latency for improved security and accelerated teamwork, and its global scope demanded a WAN provider with corresponding reach. “Microsoft operates one of the largest backbones worldwide,” says Michael Wanke, Senior Administrator of IT Infrastructure at PUMA. “That was one of our key reasons for choosing Microsoft Virtual WAN.”

Reducing latency, speeding teamwork

The team had built a well-architected Azure infrastructure earlier, so deploying Virtual WAN was a simple next step that netted almost immediate results. “When we introduced Virtual WAN, our employees were very happy,” recounts Hausner. “It boosted cloud adoption because users were so pleased with the speed. As soon as we onboarded the Asia Pacific region to Azure Virtual WAN, connectivity to our central services improved. Latency is reduced for all of our locations.”

The Azure networking infrastructure also eases data sovereignty law compliance while expediting data transfers. “Now that we have the flexibility of hosting country-specific solutions in the appropriate region with Virtual WAN, we’ve solved the issue of data crossing multiple regions and exposing it to the public internet,” explains Wanke.

The team uses Azure File Sync to get the best of both worlds: an on-premises performance cache for local users plus cloud scale and worldwide syncing. This reduces latency, improving security and speeding teamwork. It also simplifies IT management and reduces the total cost of ownership for running file services. The team also synced an important global file share that previously used Distributed File System Replication for replication around the world. “Now we have one Azure file storage account that we sync across the globe to keep everyone collaborating easily,” says Sebastian Lilienthal, Senior IT Cloud Architect at PUMA. “Everyone works together easily.”

Running the business faster on one cloud

PUMA runs the Standard version of Virtual WAN. It discovered that even though it had dropped its MPLS line, it didn’t need the Azure ExpressRoute capability to support PUMA’s speed requirements. “We have no latency-critical applications, so Standard Virtual WAN makes a lot of sense for us,” says Hausner. That adds to the cost-effectiveness of Virtual WAN.

The company is migrating its SAP HANA enterprise resource planning system to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (SAP HEC), a move that lines up with the expediency that PUMA so prizes. The company doesn’t have a network hub in Southeast Asia, for example, but SAP has high-performance virtual machines available in that region. Now that PUMA uses Virtual WAN, it found that it could easily deploy a new Virtual WAN hub and take advantage of SAP HEC—another productivity enhancement for the company.

Because SAP HEC is a managed service, PUMA no longer has to maintain on-premises service clusters, which is a definite boost for PUMA’s current digital transformation. “All of our locations found that they could add Azure services very quickly because the connectivity discussions aren’t required anymore,” says Hausner.

The PUMA IT team begins every new request or project with one question: does the solution require access to internal resources? Because of the ease of use in connecting internal resources like Azure Virtual Machines, the IT Infrastructure team no longer has to engage in complex architectural discussions to address an affirmative answer. “If we’re going to host something in Azure, we’ll obviously just use a virtual network connection in Virtual WAN,” says Lilienthal. “It’s super easy, super smart, and there isn’t much to consider because the routing is already in place. We just connect a virtual network with two clicks in the portal.”

Simplifying for success—with Microsoft

The Virtual WAN project team appreciates the support that PUMA has gotten from the German Microsoft team. “As soon as we express an interest in a new technology, the team connects us with the product management team in the United States,” says Hausner. “We’re getting the latest information, road maps, and more, which helps our planning. We know where the strategy is going.”

That strong relationship makes it easier for PUMA to embrace just one cloud. “We chose Azure after comparing the available cloud options, and we deepened our investment with training for our IT team,” recalls Hausner. Lilienthal adds, “The Azure services available are everything we need for our business—we don’t need a multi-cloud environment, which would require multi-cloud management tools. Virtual WAN fits this simple picture and gives us the fast connectivity we need without complex overhead.”

PUMA started its cloud journey early. It standardized on the platform that it feels offers the best overall solution rather than the best-in-breed approach. “Why implement the solution that’s ranked highest because of all the features we’ll never use?” asks Hausner. “Trying to connect a series of unrelated solutions and manage uncoordinated upgrades isn’t ultimately state of the art, and it would actually just slow us down.”

PUMA’s cloud investment feeds into its “Forever Faster” mentality. “We value that when Microsoft releases a new solution, it aligns other Microsoft services with it,” concludes Hausner. “That helps a lot and makes us faster when delivering solutions to our business units and internal customers.”

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