Unilever Claims It's a 'Cloud-Only Enterprise' (theregister.com) 63
Multi-brand consumer megacorp Unilever says it has become a "cloud-only enterprise" with the help of Accenture and Microsoft. From a report: One of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the retail goods industry, according to the company, will give Unilever "resilient, secure and optimised operations" as well as "a platform to drive innovation and growth." The Anglo-Dutch biz owns more than 400 brands, which include everything from ice cream to shampoo to toilet cleaner, and is set to use Microsoft's Azure as its "primary cloud platform."
According to the corporate blurb, the move will see Unilever employ "industrial metaverse technologies" that use real-time data from factory digital twins. It musn't have got the memo from Microsoft, which recently put a bullet in its own industrial metaverse masterplan. The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilver. Lastly, through Microsoft's partnership with the controversial GPT maker, it will use "Azure OpenAI Service across Unilever's business to drive increased automation, enabling better customer and employee experiences."
According to the corporate blurb, the move will see Unilever employ "industrial metaverse technologies" that use real-time data from factory digital twins. It musn't have got the memo from Microsoft, which recently put a bullet in its own industrial metaverse masterplan. The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilver. Lastly, through Microsoft's partnership with the controversial GPT maker, it will use "Azure OpenAI Service across Unilever's business to drive increased automation, enabling better customer and employee experiences."
Hitchhiker's Guide Quote (Score:4, Funny)
So sad... (Score:5, Informative)
Unilever used to have an impressive data center in Connecticut that was amazingly reliable. They then outsourced that to HP, and the quality of service fell off a cliff.
The good news for Microsoft is that the bar for improvement will be very low for them.
Re:So sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they'll discover the bad news of the equation - the money that Microsoft wants to run their "cloud".
The cloud services are like a very addictive drug - once you are trapped and your own IT competence is lost you can't go back.
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A quick browse of dedicated machine prices and they still look less expensive than cloud counterparts.
Isn't "cloud" meant to be for short term offloading when you can't get things onprem in time? Moving whole data centres seems counter intuitive.
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Corporations also think that they can save on headcount cost for IT support.
The day when things go down the crapper there's absolutely nobody competent to do anything above pencil and paper tech level.
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Well they sort of save as they don't need as many cable guys, they're rolled into the cost at the cloud. They do however now need to employ cost optimisation people. So the bottom line is more, just in different ways. When it hits the fan, there's no physical assets to sell.
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Unilever used to have an impressive data center in Connecticut that was amazingly reliable. They then outsourced that to HP, and the quality of service fell off a cliff.
The good news for Microsoft is that the bar for improvement will be very low for them.
No bar is too low for Microsoft. Especially when it comes to Azure.
Re: So sad... (Score:1)
Re: So sad... (Score:2)
Consumer goods have to be designed amd tested. CAD files, test equipment, thermal/mechanical FEM models and outputs, etc, are quite a bit bigger than the average spreadsheet or even PowerPoint. And they need to be moved around and syncd for collaboration, even in the same building.
Going back and forth to "the cloud" can make that shit grind to a halt.
Re: So sad... (Score:1)
Re: So sad... (Score:1)
"industrial metaverse technologies" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"industrial metaverse technologies" (Score:5, Funny)
I fed the buzzwords to chatGPT and asked it for something more enjoyable to choke on.
"Elevate Your Industry with OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the Metaverse: Unlocking the Potential of VR Pulled-Pork Sandwiches!"
Hopefully your choking is more delicious.
Re: choking on buzzwords (Score:2)
Indeed! Seems MS-PHB's got together with Unilever-PHB's to form this screwball marketing campaign
Per intro: "The cloud contract is also expected to help "achieve perpetual breakthroughs in research and development," says Unilever."
So what magic things can they do on the cloud that they couldn't do before? Arguably server management may be easier, but what domain benefits?
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They seem to be quoting direclty from Microsoft quite often. It is almost as if they also outsourced their Public Relations department to Microsoft as well.
All eggs in one basket... (Score:5, Interesting)
These cloud only enterprises sound cool, but I hope it is part of their BCP if someone gets into their root account and just deletes everything. It isn't uncommon for Active Directory to get completely compromised, and once someone gets a core Azure account, that can mean an enterprise is toast, especially if backups are stored in Azure blobs. Object locking can help, but then there is re-creating all the infrastructure and AAD items, as well as the InTune configuration.
This isn't to say that cloud is bad, but it isn't a 100% cure-all, and if not done right, can be extremely costly... although because cloud stuff is an OpEx expense, companies are happily to spend an order of magnitude more out of that pocket than risk investor ire with CapEx expenditures.
Re:All eggs in one basket... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't to say that cloud is bad, but it isn't a 100% cure-all, and if not done right, can be extremely costly.
Agreed. I keep thinking of that old business addage told to me by a successful entrepreneur: "It's rare to come out on top renting something your business needs. Own it, instead." Being an older IT person, I've seen the pendulum swing from the "Let us run your business on a timeshare" EDS style "cloud hosting" to the "Host it all yourself" culture of 1998 back to "Cloud is the panacea for all." It'll just keep swinging. It's like endianness. There is no right answer: so choose what works best in your situation but I'd be skeptical of any rent seeking corporation who claims they have a better deal. I remember Microsoft of the 1990's and I'm not hosting a single bit with those folks or anyone like them, but I cannot say it's a 100% bad idea. Just that I would need a lot of convincing and cost-benefit analysis to ever be okay with it, given the untrustworthy folks on the other side of the deal (Google, AWS, Rackspace, etc..).
Re:All eggs in one basket... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen a business sell a building because the new owner agreed to rent it at a lower price than it cost to run. Five years later after the lease was up for renewal they went out of business because they couldn't afford the rent. The place was then rented at more than twice the previous rate.
Seldom is renting cheaper than owning unless it short term.
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Seldom is renting cheaper than owning unless it short term.
That's actually not true. Companies have a core business which they are good and efficient at. This is the fundamental basis of a service industry, and it is almost universal that a capable services company is able to provide building services cheaper than you doing something yourself, even in the long term.
The issue you are running into is greed.
I work for one of those companies who sold our building only to lease it back. 25 years later it's still held up as a great financial decision that made a huge gai
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Companies have a core business which they are good and efficient at.
I think it's helpful to make a distinction between equipment versus services. Renting a piece of equipment for a higher overall cost than buying the equipment would probably be bad unless you are capable of investing the difference during the rental period and making more on your investment than the delta. However, having someone perform a service that you yourself would just bungle and overspend on would probably be prudent.
Re: All eggs in one basket... (Score:2)
Owning should be cheaper than renting. When you rent, you're paying for flexibility and when you own you're trading responsibility and inflexibility for dollars saved in flexibility and the other guy's profit margin. If neither of those potential downsides is a real added cost for you, congratulations: owning is cheaper than renting.
Re: All eggs in one basket... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm old, and the pendulum has swung ore times than that. "History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
You save personnel costs with outsourcing, but ultimately you pay for someone else to have the personnel, plus a profit margin. Makes sense for small companies, but for big ones? No, no way.
Some CIO earned a fat bonus for this transition. Just wait, his successor will earn a fat bonus for bringing everything back in house.
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I hope that all parties will continue to work together and not self destruct as the project is 'done'.
Re: All eggs in one basket... (Score:2)
because cloud stuff is an OpEx expense, companies are happily to spend an order of magnitude more out of that pocket than risk investor ire with CapEx expenditures.
This really depends on the company and the mindset of the investors. Generally speaking, long term investors prefer to see Capex and short term prefer Opex. Capex, at least in theory, is an immediate spend usually on assets which have tangible value and should result in long term growth. Where as Opex is just an ongoing cost.
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Problem is that lever isn't well protected and the janitor pressed it last night, flushing the entire works down the drain.
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"They only have one lever!"
That's why they never have to complain that Kronk pulled the wrong one.
Way too risky (Score:2)
Going complete cloud means if there's a massive solar flare, or something that knocks their network offline for weeks, then boom, Unilever is out of business.
Dumb dumb short-term-only thinking.
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Going complete cloud means if there's a massive solar flare, or something that knocks their network offline for weeks, then boom, Unilever is out of business.
The network is the [reason for the] computer, remember? If something knocks their network offline for weeks, they won't be able to do business no matter where the data is hosted. But if they've done it right, then cloud hosting their business logic means that it is broadly geographically dispersed and redundant, and that means it's less likely that a massive solar flare will wipe out all of "their" back end systems — and that means a much faster turnaround on getting things up and running as they only
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if a solar flare knocks a cloud provider off line, it would also disrupt most of the Internet in the process.
Having your own datacenter makes sense, unless you country gets invaded or you have only one big DC and there is a fire or something. Renting from someone like Microsoft, Amazon, or anyone else who has many DCs throughout the world is going to at least give redundancy from a single DC failure. Of course the next risk is if the cloud provider screws up your billing and shuts you off instead of trying
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Renting from someone like Microsoft, Amazon, or anyone else who has many DCs throughout the world is going to at least give redundancy from a single DC failure.
That's what the cloud providers would like you to believe (and it is probably even randomly true). I have read more than one story where a cloud provider's customer lost everything because the cloud provider had all of the customer's data in a single data center, and there were no backups for that customer when the data center went temporarily belly up due to a cloud provider's administration fuckup.
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ISTR something about the product that doing it for you now (probably for too much money) but it used to be that if you wanted geographical redundancy you had to explicitly start your instances in a particular city, and you had to arrange for your own replication.
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Are cloud providers giving redundancy? Do they also have a track record of reliability? Outages are a thing and I've seen them. Sure, maybe it's just one to eight hours, but that can be a lot. Local data centers can have redundancy, it's not like the old school people were idiots and forgot about that. What's unclear is if Microsoft or Amazon aren't also staffed by the same types of idiots that used to staff the badly run owned data centers.
Remember, the commonality with idiots in IT departments is that
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For the AWS hosting my team uses I get emails for outages in regional DCs. If we were forking over lots of money for duplication of services in multiple DCs it wouldn't be a problem. But my team isn't wasting money on the redundancy for the internal projects we're hosting on AWS, so I manually shuffle things around to keep build system and continuous integration going. If we were larger scale I'd have this fully automated.
sounds expensive (Score:2)
Remember when you buy Unilever products that 20% of the price goes to Accenture and Microsoft.
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Sorry to break it to you but I am quite confident that some portion of the money that you spend on any product goes toward paying the software license cost of some terrible organization (Think: Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc)
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Not every large business goes 'full cloud'. Honestly, it sounds a bit limiting. Full cloud is going to be more expensive over time but lets you manage fewer of the IT folks that you do not understand, it is for management that likes the easy button rather than you know, managing. Says something about management that I do not like.
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Remember when you buy Unilever products that 20% of the price goes to Accenture and Microsoft.
Well shit....we just spent the last 3 years completely ditching Microsoft technology at client offices. We've saved clients about $275,000 in licensing costs so far--even after accounting for the costs of GSuite licenses (verses Exchange on-prem upgrade costs), and the higher costs of having techs that know and understand Linux and BSD. We even migrated a fairly simple legacy app from ASP.NET / Windows Server / SQL Server that had an "upgrade" price tag of ~$40,000 to a cloud-based app that I wrote in les
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> Microsoft loses ~$300,000, but gains $0.38 from me washing my butthole? It's a fair trade.
Made me laugh, thank you.
Not all of us are so lucky as to divorce MS.
Neato (Score:1)
Did you hear that I found a new mayonnaise? Now that that's done, you worthless human shitbags in charge there can fuck off now with the rest of your greedy enterprise. Cheers!
It all went wrong for Unilever... (Score:1)
Time to short Unilever (Score:2)
Short-selling keyword search hits and weights:
Cloud (10), Microsoft (20), Azure (20)
Automation (30)
Better w/5 employee experiences (40)
OpenAI (100)
Metaverse(1000) ...brought to you by FuckGPT, the automated short-selling platform created by the inventors of MoviePhone(tm)
So (Score:1)
Is this the Unilever? (Score:3)
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Forgot all about this. Used to be good, four or five ingredient ice cream with actual representative flavors and no fillers, emulsifiers or texturizers. Made a series of commercials with some white-haired dad-type with copy all about the simplicity of it.
Shitstains all the runners of this company. It contains brands--that's it. Help it to die, so I can have my mayonnaise back.
Probably won't solve the problems they think (Score:4, Insightful)
IT requires constant upkeep, maintenance, and iteration. It requires investing in your team that will keep things running. If you don't invest in the people you need then your IT will have problems. Unilever is chasing a magical solution that they think will fix all their problems. But, unless they invest in their people their cloud-only enterprise will soon suffer the same problems that led them to this in the first place.
Re: Probably won't solve the problems they think (Score:2)
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IT requires constant upkeep, maintenance, and iteration. It requires investing in your team that will keep things running.
Yeah sounds difficult. One of those things that few companies seem to be capable of getting right. Just as well you can outsource this to a provider who can take care of this for you.
This is going to be fun (Score:4, Insightful)
What am I reading? (Score:2)
This summary seems like a bunch of buzzword word salad to me.
What did they actually do?
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> What did they actually do?
Made their entire enterprise dependent on a single vendor.
Shall we skip to the end of the story?
Fun (Score:4, Interesting)
It's going to be really fun when businesses like these finally realize that "cloud" only means that you are storing your data on someone else's computer, and a competitor is storing their data on the same computer as your data, and that they both are only one cloud-administrator's fuckup away from those datasets becoming indistinguishable from one another.
Yes, I'm well aware that the cloud propaganda says that won't happen. And it won't. Until it does. And that's going to be a gloriously entertaining news day. Not that anyone will learn anything from it, which makes it all the more entertaining.
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It's going to be really fun when businesses like these finally realize that "cloud" only means that you are storing your data on someone else's computer
There's nothing fun here. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that "other person's computer" is far better run and managed than when you threw a token IT budget and tried to do it yourself.
The doom and gloom of the "other person's computer" just hasn't realised. Cloud downtime for most people is a tiny fraction of the downtime they had themselves.
and a competitor is storing their data on the same computer as your data, and that they both are only one cloud-administrator's fuckup away from those datasets becoming indistinguishable from one another.
You have weird fantasy if you think it's that easy to merge two different datasets. Heck there are companies who have spent literal millions of dollars attemp
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What is becoming increasingly obvious is that "other person's computer" is far better run and managed than when you...tried to do it yourself.
I understand that you have an attachment to Cloud computers, but your viewpoint is stunningly inaccurate. I'm not going to do your research for you, but perhaps this will ring a bell:
https://www.wiz.io/blog/82-of-... [www.wiz.io]
That's just one of many.
It's WAY easier to give away all your secret data on a Cloud computer than it is when you maintain your own systems. That one single flaw, among a staggeringly large number of Cloud flaws should be enough to warn people away from Cloud computing, but too many people have
Inept company (Score:5, Interesting)
Accenture? (Score:1)
Accenture and Azure.
Imagining a recruiter calling me up. Yes sir they are fully in Azure cloud and most of the project has been outsourced to Accenture. Your role will be.
Yeah my gut would tell me dumpster fire stay away.
Unilever makes things like... (Score:2)
How long before they realise... (Score:1)
Nothing learned (Score:1)
One thing that politics has shown us is if you depend on the cloud and you don't control the cloud you can be shut down anytime. Amazon has in their contract that you're responsible for your data. That is, backing it up. Not them. In the case of Parlor, they were taken off the air and it took a long time for them to recover if they ever did. IDK, I don't use it. Imagine a manufacturing company being at the whim of another company. The cloud provider could go out of business next month without warning or be
Is it really the most cost effective way? (Score:2)
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they did the math and risk management due diligence and assume right now, this is best for them, but you need to be continuously on the lookout to see if it's actually best.
They should at least be cloud agnostic and be able to use a mix of providers, if at l