HCLTech migrates Windchill PLM system from PTC Cloud to AWS

Our client, a leading Swedish industrial automation company headquartered in Västerås and Zürich, has maintained its Fortune 500 status for 24 years. With over 100,000 employees, the company specializes in delivering innovative digital technologies for a sustainable and resource-efficient future. They partnered with HCLTech to migrate their Windchill PLM system from PTC Cloud to AWS, enhancing system control, optimizing costs and establishing a geographically resilient architecture that ensures high availability and scalability, along with significant cost savings.

The Challenge

The client was using Windchill as their enterprise PLM system, hosted on PTC Cloud and encountered several challenges:

Limited customization, optimization and troubleshooting capabilities due to PTC Cloud’s control over operational management, leading to dependencies on PTC’s support and timelines for any changes or issues
A lack of transparency regarding the underlying infrastructure, performance metrics and operational procedures, making it difficult to access system health, performance and security details, which impacted decision-making, issue forecasting and capacity planning
The need to optimize costs while ensuring high application availability and performance, requiring efficient resource allocation, cloud service selection and monitoring strategies
No proven geographical resiliency for the Windchill application

The Objective

The client aimed to migrate Windchill from the PTC Cloud to AWS, addressing system complexities and improving operational control and resilience. The primary objectives were:

Enhance control and transparency: Gain full visibility and control over infrastructure, operational procedures and system management
Optimize costs and efficiency: Achieve cost savings without sacrificing performance or availability
Ensure geographical resiliency: Design a highly available and geographically resilient architecture for the Windchill application, considering its large user base and critical operations

The Solution

HCLTech developed and executed a comprehensive migration strategy to transition the Windchill application from PTC Cloud to AWS Cloud, focusing on improved control, performance and availability. Key steps included:

Detailed assessment: Conducted a thorough analysis of the existing Windchill environment, including infrastructure, data volumes, integrations and performance metrics
Collaborative design: Worked closely with the client to align business objectives, operational constraints and specific AWS environment requirements
AWS architecture: Designed a robust, scalable AWS architecture tailored to host Windchill, ensuring high availability, security and compliance with industry standards
Data migration strategy: Managed the efficient migration of 70 TB of file system data and 5 TB of database data
Proactive monitoring: Implemented continuous monitoring and alerting systems using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Config for proactive security management
Disaster recovery (DR) strategy: Based on the client’s classification of Windchill as a silver-tier application, HCLTech adopted a backup and restore DR strategy to meet recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) limits
DR drill and guide: Conducted a full DR drill prior to go-live and provided a comprehensive DR guide, outlining pre-DR, DR drill and post-DR activities
Geographical resiliency: Designed a highly available and geographically resilient Windchill deployment architecture on AWS to ensure continuity in case of disruptions

The Impact

HCLTech delivered significant outcomes for our client, resulting in enhanced operational efficiency and substantial cost savings. Key achievements include a resilient architecture on AWS that ensures business continuity while providing full control and transparency over operations.

Achieved 20% cost savings while maintaining high application availability and performance
Delivered a highly available and geographically resilient architecture for Windchill on AWS, ensuring business continuity
The client gained full control and transparency over operations and infrastructure, eliminating the challenges of limited visibility
AWS provided a scalable and flexible infrastructure, enabling the client to meet growing business demands effectively

AWS services used: