Case Study: Zespri International achieves IT cost savings and disaster resilience with Microsoft Azure

Kiwi Grower Prunes Costs, Defends Business from Disasters by Running SAP in the Cloud

Zespri International, a New Zealand–based company and the world’s largest marketer of kiwifruit, works with 2,600 growers and employs about 280 people globally. After the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and a devastating kiwifruit virus exposed weaknesses in its IT disaster recovery and cost structure, Zespri needed a more resilient, scalable, and cost‑effective way to run business‑critical systems like SAP.

With Datacom, Zespri migrated SAP, SharePoint and other applications to Microsoft Azure (initially using ~100 Azure VMs in a US datacenter), tested SAP performance, and moved to cloud management with System Center and Office 365. The move cut IT costs by an estimated $700k–$1M, insulated operations from local natural disasters through georeplication, delivered sub‑second SAP response times, and gave the company instant scalability so it can focus on growing and selling kiwifruit.

Zespri International

Andrew Goodin

Global Manager of Information Systems