Forza Steel

The challenge

Forza Steel is an industrial group whose technology operation has grown rapidly in recent years, both on the business and the technology side. Leading that transformation is Juan Daniel Alonso, the group's Global Director of Transformation and Technology. For years the company ran on traditional on-premise infrastructure, but the pace of growth demanded more agile processes and an ecosystem able to scale with the operation — setting the course toward a hybrid infrastructure, today running on AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Growth brought increasing complexity: how to interconnect tools, which middlewares and protocols to use, and how to simplify the digital ecosystem without inflating infrastructure TCO or TCI. On top of that came a fundamental decision: migrating the SAP ecosystem to RISE required choosing among hyperscalers — AWS, Google, and Microsoft — each with different competitive advantages. Without in-house specialists across all three ecosystems, Forza Steel risked making that decision with incomplete information.

The solution

The iNBest team supported Forza Steel across the entire implementation and transformation roadmap, including the full assessment to select the cloud on which its SAP RISE ecosystem would run. The analysis compared AWS, Google, and Microsoft in depth: connectivity with the rest of the digital ecosystem, storage costs, and how each hyperscaler's AI agents and tools interconnect with SAP.

Behind the choice was a fundamental question: what the company intends to do with its data. Together with iNBest, Forza Steel evaluated each ecosystem on data extraction (ETL/ELT), storage, data lake creation, data warehouses for information governance, real-time analytics, and business intelligence through BI. That evaluation — weighted by category and consolidated into an overall score — determined that Microsoft and its Microsoft Fabric suite were the best option, reconfirming that the fusion of SAP and Microsoft Azure was the right path for Forza Steel, in a process that took roughly two months.

Results

• A 12%–14% reduction in infrastructure TCO, thanks to the multicloud assessment carried out with iNBest
• FinOps analyses that right-sized actual AWS and Azure consumption — no overprovisioning, no capacity shortfalls
• An informed, unbiased architecture decision, avoiding the blind spots of lacking in-house specialists for each hyperscaler
• A clear data and BI foundation, establishing Microsoft Fabric as the central tool for governance, analytics, and business intelligence