Kloud Solutions takes Suncorp’s auto repairs partner Capital SMART Repairs into Azure

Australia’s Kloud Solutions has helped a national smash repairs business replace its growth-inhibiting IT infrastructure and ascend to the Microsoft cloud on Azure.

Capital SMART Repairs provides repairs and touch ups to vehicles that have sustained low-to-medium collision damage has 31 sites across Australia. The repair company is partnered with Suncorp and services its range of insurance brands including AAMI, GIO and Bingle.

SMART’s chief information officer, John Bajan, told CRN the company’s growth journey had seen it reach a point where an IT overhaul was vital to keeping up with demand.

"We originally operated on a hybrid platform consisting of Telstra’s CSX platform, local file and print services, and Azure.  With the rapid growth of the organisation, we needed a platform that gave us the scalability and flexibility to react to these needs," he said.

"When an organisation begins with three repair shops, the IT requirements are very basic, so growing the business to 40 sites has had its challenges."

SMART needed a platform that could be adapted from the repair company’s Telstra CSX environment at a lower cost and greater capacity to accommodate the expanding business. Kloud Solutions, an owned subsidiary of Telstra, was engaged to design an approach that SMART could migrate and scale into.

"Telstra have and continue to be a strategic partner of Capital SMART.  Via this relationship, Kloud were introduced and contracted to build, transition and finally commission our new Azure platform," Bajan said.

“We needed a solution initially for information capture, we take photos of each vehicle that comes in for repair. Over the years that’s amounted to about six million photos we’ve captured, something that our previous IT structure could not accommodate.

"Kloud Solutions also played a key role in helping deploy and design our solution; the expertise they provided was integral to the success of the new environment. The accessibility of the Microsoft Azure platform was a major benefit, enabling us to re-think our whole network as we continue to grow and develop our customer services. It has also reduced incremental costs and given us the required flexibility and scalability.”

Kloud shut down Capital SMART Repairs’ old hosting environment, then rebuilt a branded platform exclusively on Microsoft Azure.

In 2016 SMART Repairs grew from 750 to 1000 staff. This year the company expects to see its 31 sites across Australia expand to 40.

Kloud was purchased by Telstra for an undisclosed amount in January 2016.

Telstra executive director global enterprise and services Michelle Bendschneider said at the time that Kloud would serve a niche important to the telco's future growth.

"We looked at the growth we wanted to achieve and thought the missing piece of the puzzle was the ability to migrate solutions to the cloud," she said.

"We were lacking in enterprise cloud application, and there was a need to build up that capability and be able to leverage our channel partners."

The buyout was one of several of high-profile acquisitions by Telstra in 2016, which included application developer Readify, enterprise mobility management provider MSC Mobility and cybersecurity analytics firm Cognevo.