Integrating Several Legacy IT Departments

About the Company

The Company is a roll up of a number of small companies, at 70 locations and in 20 countries, primarily involved in manufacturing. Fueled by the growth of acquisitions over the past few years, the conglomerate never really integrated their disparate IT departments. The locations are a combination of offices, data centers and manufacturing sites. The Company needs to integrate the legacy IT departments while simplifying the support model, reducing support costs, reducing CapEx and wherever possible, using the public cloud.

Integration Challenges

The Company had a very complex and decentralized IT function. In total there were seven different ERP systems running across all the entities. The documentation was poor or nonexistent. From what documentation did exist, the Company estimated they had 900 servers including current and legacy devices.
Each country had its own IT staff, who were very protective of their territory and so tended to keep information to themselves. Information was siloed and a lot of misinformation was spread. There was little to no network connectivity between entities in the US and EU.

The Solution

The primary challenge was asset discovery with the US and EU companies not communicating due to specific firewall settings. The solution was to deploy Device42 asset discovery with data collectors situated in both the US and EU. In that way, data could be collected without a lot of firewall changes.

Device42 was used to conduct an enterprise wide audit and application dependency mapping exercise. Deploying Device42 in the US and Europe enabled efficient data capture. The approximate duration of the discovery and analysis was 60 days.

Implementation

Bruce Elsner, working for a consultancy, led the project and team that implemented Device42. The team ran Device42 and collected data for 30 days. After that, they spent another 30 days analyzing the data after which they created a Consolidation and Migration Plan.

Because they were allowed to VPN in to collect the data, the project was executed entirely remotely with no travel required. When asked about the Device42 implementation, Bruce Elsner said, “We like Device42 so much for its ability to collect data across a number of different platforms and technologies, from Solaris all the way up to Microsoft and Linux. That’s a real advantage with Device42 when you go into a client like this with such a variety of hardware. We were able to be successful here very easily.”

Results

Asset discovery and application dependency mapping were used to simplify and consolidate the IT function. The Consolidation and Migration Plan was used to migrate specific workload to the public cloud and to help retire technical debt. As a result, the Company reduced the number of servers by approximately 60% and reduced the number of locations from 72 to seven across the US and EU. Money was saved on both servers and headcount as the number of employees in IT was reduced across the Company.

Device42 Solution Benefits

Mr. Elsner shared his biggest takeaway from the project. “What we discovered is often times when people say they’ve got it covered and they know what they’ve got, they really don’t. When we show them the Device42 application dependency maps, where the servers are and all the connections, they instantly get a sense of how little they actually understand about their IT environment.”

“When the CIO asks you for a list of every IT asset you have, would you rather spin up a team and get to work or push a button? Device42 automatically delivers that information and keeps it up to date so you can always be audit ready,” said Mr. Elsner.