Why Fender chose a move to the cloud to keep up with increased demand

The cloud is essential to today’s music industry. It’s the place where streaming services store their vast catalogues of songs, and it provides processing power for the technology that allows engineers to produce music online. For a company such as the legendary guitar-maker Fender, it’s where they operate their hugely popular Fender Play®, a subscription-based learning app for aspiring guitar players. And, increasingly, it is becoming vital to all aspects of their business.

When the Covid-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented guitar-buying boom, Fender realised that the in-house on-premises systems that supported the crucial back-end of their business was in need of an upgrade. The company’s CIO, Michael Spandau, explains: “The challenge was keeping up with business demand. Our business almost doubled during the pandemic – and our ageing ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] systems were struggling to keep up.”

Time to move up

Fender’s legacy hardware was showcasing challenges, too, and considerable resources were required for its maintenance. One potential solution was to move Fender’s crucial ERP system onto AWS. The company had some experience working in the cloud through Fender Play®, which is both a revenue source in its own right and helps drive the sales of physical instruments. “Fender Play® was built from the ground up, in the cloud,” says Spandau. “So we knew some of the big benefits of having systems running in the cloud. We just wanted to get our legacy ERP system to that same level.”

Creating something from scratch in the cloud and migrating existing systems are very different undertakings, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher for Fender. Its ERP system was the foundation upon which the whole operation was built, with finance, sales and supply-chain management all depending on it.

Spandau understood as CIO that Fender needed the right people to help them make the switch, and that meant reaching out to a partner with a keen understanding of SAP (the market-leading ERP software), and how it works on AWS. AWS Premier partner Lemongrass seemed a perfect fit, thanks to their strong track record of highly automated migration and operation services that cut costs and drive growth.

“Lemongrass was one of the very few firms that were able to convince us they had the relevant experience to migrate our global ERP system to the Amazon cloud,” says Spandau. “We needed a company with the deep technical expertise to do it and, even more importantly, they had to be able to do it over a three-day weekend.”

After a few scheduled practice runs during which the process was stress-tested, Spandau decided his team was ready to migrate to the cloud over a weekend. “We literally shut off the old system on the Friday afternoon, then on the following Monday morning we activated the new system.”

Scalable and secure

The aim had been to create a structure that would be more reliable, as well as supporting greater scalability, security, flexibility and innovation. And that’s what Fender got. “It has been a great success,” says Spandau. “We are able to redirect resources that, in the past, were keeping the systems up and running. We no longer need to acquire and operate new hardware, and we are now able to really focus on new functional processes that the business needs. We can move huge and significant data sets very easily from one system to another. And we are able to scale up the systems with the click of a button.”

Crucially, the Fender IT team has been able to use AWS Cloud to better integrate its back-end systems with other cloud-based AWS services such as machine learning, the Internet of Things and operational monitoring. The switch to AWS also cuts out unnecessary time spent on work such as infrastructure capacity planning, as storage capacity can be so easily adjusted in the cloud. And the partnership has proved enduring, with Lemongrass continuing to operate as a Managed Service Provider for Fender’s SAP ecosystem, with a focus on security and functionality; key tasks include critical system monitoring, patching and application upgrades.

Running its SAP systems on AWS Cloud with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors means that Fender gets the benefits of 16 years of pioneering cloud innovation, which has developed technology with breadth, experience and capabilities that can be used to build virtually anything. This kind of support means the team at Fender can concentrate on what they do best: supporting players on their musical journeys, and introducing innovative gear to its music-loving customers. As Spandau puts it: “Leo Fender once said that all artists were angels, and it was his job to give them wings to fly. Well, it's my job and my team's job – from an IT perspective – to help Fender to continue to fly.”