By seizing the opportunity to shift from a legacy on-premise infrastructure to a Datacom-hosted Azure Local platform, Enatel has not only modernised its New Zealand operations; it has created a scalable blueprint for future international growth.
Enatel partnered with Datacom for this critical cloud migration, designed to reduce their infrastructure footprint while providing the agility and data residency assurance needed to run its core business systems and prepare for future native cloud adoption. Crucially, this move positions the NZ operation as a model for how the business can standardise and scale its infrastructure as it expands overseas.
The company, which designs and produces industrial vehicle chargers for electric material handling equipment like forklifts, automated guided vehicles and baggage trucks employs around 200 people, 80 of whom are manufacturing staff. In 2018 it was acquired by Illinois-based industrial manufacturer, Ideal Industries and became one of three divisions; the other two being US-based companies.
“We design and develop the products and manufacture them here ourselves,” says Enatel IT Manager Stuart Wyness. “We do the surface mounts of the specific motherboards and assemble the chargers before they’re boxed and shipped out to customers.” Enatel has customers and distribution hubs globally, with the business continuing to expand.
Before the strategic move to consolidate manufacturing from three separate buildings into one facility, Enatel was constrained by its traditional on-premise IT infrastructure. This limited its ability to respond quickly to change and demanded continual management of the physical infrastructure footprint.
As the environment grew, scaling and modernising the workloads supporting critical operations became increasingly challenging. The business needed to solve a complex equation: how to gain cloud flexibility while still maintaining strict data residency and operational continuity requirements on the factory floor.
Enatel partnered with Datacom on the architectural design of its Microsoft Azure Local deployment to deliver a tailored solution, including Azure monitor and a Veeam Software backup environment, ensuring their digital backbone is as resilient as their physical manufacturing
“We’ve strongly aligned with Microsoft for all our technology going forward with MS Office and the Azure platform we’ve built out. We’ve also embarked on a MS Dynamics 365 ERP rollout,” says Wyness.
Enatel also considered what to do with its new Edge Server cloud infrastructure.
“This was a global question not only for us, but our sister companies in the US,” says Wyness.
For the manufacturing system, large volumes of data on equipment, product parts and components must be entered at the client end, so hosting on a local data centre keeps latency low, says Wyness.
“We evaluated several hosting facilities in Christchurch and Datacom was selected for its security, redundancy and resilience.”
Hosting Azure Local within Datacom’s Christchurch data centre has resulted in the benefits of a cloud-first operating model such as improved agility, scalability, and modern management with the control and locality Enatel needed for its manufacturing workloads.
The approach lays a modern foundation for the company’s core workloads, while seamlessly positioning the business for future expansion into the broader Azure public cloud.
The project team migrated all critical workloads supporting ERP, file and print, and domain services from the legacy on-premise environment into Azure Local with zero downtime, while integrating backup and recovery capabilities and ensuring data residency, security, and operational continuity.
Datacom Associate Director of Cloud Transformation Russell Page-Wood says, "For a manufacturer like Enatel, you can't compromise on the speed and reliability of production systems - latency on the factory floor isn't an option. We worked with them to design a 'blueprint' architecture using Azure Local. It delivers the immediate performance they need for manufacturing today, but provides a standardised, scalable cloud model that can be replicated to support their growth in US and UK markets."
With the migration to Azure Local completed, Enatel is the first division within the group to adopt this model. The remaining US‑based divisions will follow, using their own regional MSSPs. This staged approach provides a clear path to scale and standardisation across the organisation while minimising disruption.
Once all divisions are operating on Azure, the business will gain central visibility and control of workloads globally. “This enables cross‑regional support across time zones,” says Wyness.
Looking ahead, the roadmap supports a controlled, phased evolution. The business expects to operate in a hybrid model for the next two years while workloads are rationalised, with print servers, file servers and on‑premise Exchange progressively decommissioned. This staged approach keeps IT aligned with business objectives and enables continued cloud adoption at a measured pace.
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