Founded in 1902, Air Liquide is an established leader in the industrial sector. The French multinational company supplies industrial gases and services to various industries including medical, chemical and electronic manufacturers. For more than a century, they have remained at the forefront of their industry in part due to their commitment to advancing alongside emerging technologies.
In 2020, the time for one such transformation arrived. Marty Martin, Air Liquide’s director of Process Control Technology, recognized that their IT infrastructure for industry control was at a crossroads. He spoke to The Forecast in 2023 and again in 2024, explaining how their virtualization solution lacked the integration capabilities the company would need going forward. The time was ripe for modernization.
“The typical older system that we used was a homegrown, redundant VMware host and was manual,” Martin said in an interview with Nutanix at the 2023 .NEXT event in Chicago.
“It was very difficult to patch. You had to take the system down.”
At the end of 2024, Martin told The Forecast those changes made four years ago set his team on a new path to take on all sorts of innovations, including hybrid cloud, edge computing and artificial intelligence capabilities.
“Moving to Nutanix years ago gave us the ability to modernize quickly and have a centralized platform that delivers resources for new projects while controlling essential operations across our various locations.”
“Now we can leverage what public cloud services have to offer and manage it from one place. Most of all, Nutanix gave us a simpler way to manage our IT infrastructure and the confidence to try new things.”
In an industry where seamless human-to-machine interfacing is required and downtime equates to lost productivity and revenue, managing Air Liquide’s seven control system vendors centrally across its 30-40 North American locations had grown increasingly difficult.
If that wasn’t complex enough, IT professionals like Martin face challenges stemming from external factors. Unforeseen obstacles can pop up at any time, such as disruptive new technology or when vendors face significant business changes. For example, when Martin first spoke with The Forecast in 2023, Broadcom’s acquisition of software company VMware was not yet complete. That sparked massive uncertainty for people working in IT. After the deal closed in late 2023, VMware by Broadcom customers faced a slew of significant changes, including product cuts and bundling, price changes and the ending of VMware’s established partner program. VMware customers like Air Liquide who proactively diversified their IT capabilities with alternatives like Nutanix, auspiciously minimized potential disruptions caused by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.
When it comes to managing owned data centers, companies across different industries continue to face the limitations of investments they’ve made in legacy three-tier systems. These systems become hard for internal teams to let go of because they’re built to meet company-specific customization requirements, often over years and even decades. At the same time, they tend to require more time and hands-on effort to maintain. Over time, advancement in IT technologies and strategies, including hybrid multicloud, cloud-native and enterprise AI, has revealed the need to build systems that are flexible, scalable, secure and able to evolve reliably.
Martin and his team’s foresight and commitment to modernizing their IT are allowing them to move quickly and bring new value to Air Liquide.
Air Liquide's Modernization Journey to HCI
Martin said his team knew their VMware-based solution wasn’t viable long-term, and the longer they waited, the further they would have to catch up as it related to modernizing their systems and infrastructure. As a leader in the industrial gas industry, that wasn’t a risk they were willing to take. They started with a current state analysis that ultimately led them to seek a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution, which combined compute, networking and storage capabilities.
"The HCI environment is a single environment managed by software, and it makes it a lot easier to integrate multiple things within it," said Martin, underscoring what initially drew him to this modernization approach.
He said adopting this kind of environment was central to Air Liquide's strategy, offering a stark contrast to the manual, cumbersome processes of their previous infrastructure.
The demand for this kind of centralized, modern IT infrastructure is driving demand for HCI across industries. According to some research estimates, the global HCI market is expected to have grown from $9.66 billion to $11.98 billion between 2023 and 2024.
Once Martin’s team deployed Nutanix for processes he managed, there was no turning back.
“Nutanix has absolutely simplified my life,” Martin said. “We have a standard design, we've developed a standard spreadsheet. All we have to do is go through and pick the number of VMs we need and that size is our system.”
“The best thing about the Nutanix solution for me is that in the industrial world, I have a single platform that can be used across multiple control system vendors,” Martin told The Forecast.
“I have one solution – that's unheard of. Nobody does that in industry unless it's the same vendor at seven sites. This is 30-40 sites, 7+ different systems, one solution. That's a game changer.”
Cloud, AI, Edge are Priorities
Martin’s team is already eyeing the next few advancements. Public cloud is on their radar, but first will require further on-premises IT modernization.
"Our IT OT group uses a hybrid cloud," Martin explained, “But for the industrial control system, there’s no cloud at all. We're not there yet. I know it's coming and we'll look at that in the future, but the way we have it set up right now at the industrial control level, it's not a cloud, it's just local clusters.”
The admission underscores a broader industry challenge. Oil and gas companies seem to be adopting cloud computing diligently due to concerns around latency, cybersecurity and data privacy. But Martin said cloud services offer opportunities they won’t be able to ignore for long.
“To compete in the long term, North American oil and gas firms need to strengthen their technology foundations, transform their operations, digitally enable their workforces and improve customer experience through digital channels,” ISG wrote in the ISG Provider Lens Oil and Gas Industry report.
Fortunately, Martin feels that with his current Nutanix solutions in place, the Air Liquide team will be better equipped to take on cloud modernization in the future.
“There's going to have to be some infrastructure changes internally to make that possible,” he said back in 2023. “But I think with the new technology and the way in which Nutanix is moving forward, they're going to make it possible and I wouldn't be surprised if we're not one of the early adopters to get to that level of computing.”
While full cloud adoption is for the future, leveraging AI solutions is a nearer-term goal.
"Nutanix allows me to not be limited by infrastructure because I know I can grow and build it,” Martin said.
“I am looking at potential AI solutions. I'm not holding back where I would have had to before because I knew it would be such a big infrastructure change. With Nutanix, it's just a bolt on, just keep on going.”
For Air Liquide, that can mean quickly taking advantage of industry-critical AI capabilities like predictive maintenance, process optimization and real-time analytics.
Edge computing is also a focus, driven by a pressing need, particularly in industrial sectors, for real-time data processing across vast plant networks, often in remote locations.
"The edge has become increasingly more important for us," Martin noted.
“Now we are free to start adding what makes sense because we have the computational power that we can add very quickly. It just makes sense to be able to set these up, get more data or do more higher level control or analysis than to overload a system that couldn't necessarily do it in the past.”
Now that the HCI foundation is in place, the path to solutions like cloud integration for industrial controls, AI for smarter operations, and embracing edge computing will all be smoother.
“Nutanix has performed at or above where I was hoping,” Marty said. “I hold the bar very high. When you're talking best in class, you need to go with high expectations.”
And while continuous improvement, transformation and modernization come with inevitable challenges, Marty remains steadfast.
“When our team struggles, Nutanix jumps right in – that's huge. We work together well as a team. And that to me is success.”
Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan and LinkedIn.
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