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Cloud, speed and scalability. These principles have guided Jussi Sorvali as he has built up HMD Global’s IT from scratch. The smartphone maker, which was set up in 2016 and is behind the new wave of Nokia phones, needed to get its IT operations up and running in a matter of months. “I jumped into this role in summer 2016, and the company was officially published the following December,” says Sorvali, who is CIO at Finland-headquartered HMD Global. “We announced our first smartphones in February 2017 and had our ERP [enterprise resource planning] working by May, so we could actually start selling the phones.” The fast pace meant Sorvali didn’t have time for a traditional large-scale IT deployment. Instead, he chose to go for full-on cloud, including SAP Business ByDesign cloud ERP. The decision has paid off. HMD’s first ERP deployments were ready in a few months, and a global roll-out to 33 countries was finished within six months. “We needed to get the company on its feet and the business running,” says Sorvali. “We could start ...