As a leading global merchant and processor of agricultural goods, Louis Dreyfus Company sees its digital systems as a key lever of success. That’s why the company turned to EPAM for its cloud transformation with Azure. Thanks to the partnership, multiple global data centers and hundreds of applications are now in the cloud, helping the company improve its services to customers around the world.

In today’s quickly evolving business landscape, it’s more important than ever for companies to take a cloud-native approach to systems. For digital-native companies and others with strong digital roots, a cloud enhancement might be relatively straightforward. But what happens when a company with nearly two centuries of experience in tangible, physical commodities decides to undertake a cloud transformation?

That’s exactly what Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) had planned. Thanks to a successful data analytics partnership starting in 2019, LDC again selected EPAM from a sourcing process to continue its cloud journey.

As one of the largest agricultural commodity merchants and food processors in the world, the company helps feed and clothe over 500 million people globally and employs over 17,000 people. Not only would LDC need to migrate to Azure without impacting its daily commercial activities, but the cloud adoption would need to be comprehensive and rapid to ensure minimal disruption to the business.

Thanks to an extensive multiyear, award-winning partnership with EPAM and Microsoft, LDC is on track to realize its goal of complete cloud migration — with the most critical components and core systems now in Azure — enabling the organization to enjoy the benefits of the cloud with minimal downtime.

With its business in real physical products, including approximately 80 million tons of products that LDC originates, processes and transports annually, the company had no room for error when it came to 
cloud migration. After all, failure could result in the destruction of tangible and perishable products and related revenue loss.

To minimize risks, we worked closely with 
Microsoft and LDC to build a migration plan based 
on Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure. This comprehensive strategy included a plan to migrate three global data centers and over 1,500 application servers and databases (both SQL and Oracle), directly impacting over 350 business and IT-related applications — including mission-critical systems and environments.

Taking advantage of all the features and tools Azure offers proved integral to the overall success of LDC’s cloud transformation. We developed three landing zones in Azure and extensively employed Azure Migrate and Azure 
DevOps (ADO) services, including sprint and delivery planning, end user knowledge bases and code repository storage, to ensure the project was successful while adapting to the agile way of working of LDC.

We also utilized a Microsoft Power BI dashboard to accurately monitor both velocity and progress. Thanks to the creative and successful use of a wide range of Azure solutions, EPAM won the 2023 Microsoft US Partner of the Year Award for Migration to Azure.