NaviSite Inc.
06/14/2021 | News release | Distributed by Public on 06/14/2021 09:16
Real-World Transformation: Six Companies Solve Their Toughest IT Challenges—From Migration Deadlines to Outdated ERPs
Here's what you already know about cloud technology: It has fundamentally changed the way we work and live. With it, businesses have the power to rapidly innovate, reinvent and outmaneuver uncertainty.
Despite these benefits, however, adopting new technology can still feel like a leap of faith. Unlike one-time hardware purchases or software upgrades, implementing cloud technology is an act of significant, business-wide change. And along with it, companies face mounting questions about budget requirements, staffing needs, tight timelines, security risks and so much more.
That's why, today, many businesses find themselves at a crossroads. The amount of speed, new thinking and entirely different level of skills and investments required to achieve end-to-end digital transformation holds a lot of companies back. At the same time, the pressure to modernize alongside an increasingly fast paced and competitive landscape is only increasing.
At Navisite, we're committed to removing those barriers-and helping businesses accelerate their journey to true modernization. From solving resource constraints to overcoming a lack of staffing or expertise, we help businesses navigate their biggest challenges and successfully augment their IT capabilities for the future.
Here are six examples of how real companies successfully navigated tough IT challenges and embraced change.
1.Challenge: Unexpected Changes-AAA WCNY Responds to Work-from-Home Mandate
In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the U.S., the State of New York implemented a work-from-home (WFH) mandate that forced AAA Western and Central New York (WCNY), New York's largest member services association, to find a new way to migrate its entire workforce to a remote environment in a matter of days. With staff dispersed across 11 different locations, AAA WCNY needed to provide every employee with remote access to company networks so they could efficiently execute their jobs from the safety of home.
Working against a tight and aggressive timeline, AAA WCNY turned to Navisite to help create a virtual desktop environment. As part of its solution, Navisite would also manage the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for AAA WCNY in its hosted data center, which included building out desktop images and supporting end users.
Within a week, virtual desktop environments were deployed to AAA WCNY's employees with minimal impact. And today, AAA WCNY supports more than 200 of its remote employees with Navisite's Managed VDI Service-employees whose roles were traditionally conducted on-premises and were not previously equipped to operate remotely. The rest of the organization's 750 employees are supported through remote routers and virtual private networks (VPN).
'We now have the ability to scale up or down as needed, which will be invaluable to us in the months ahead,' said Frank D'Arrigo, director of information technology at AAA WCNY. 'As we think about what the 'new normal' will look like, we now have a model in place that shows how many of our essential roles can successfully operate remotely.'
2. Challenge: Deadline-Driven Migration-Warner Music Group Moves Legacy Systems to the Cloud Within Months
Faced with a need to modernize its IT infrastructure and reduce costs, Warner Music Group (WMG), one of the world's leading music publishers, was ready to explore a cloud-based solution for its on-premises data center in Burbank, California. However, as WMG explored its options, a second challenge soon emerged: The company needed to accomplish this major transformation within just a few months.
Due to the complexities of WMG's legacy Solaris systems and Oracle ERP applications, a 'lift-and-shift' wouldn't give the company the results it needed. Instead, all applications needed refactored to run efficiently and to make full use of cloud-native features. To achieve all of these critical initiatives within tight time constraints, WMG required the ERP applications and cloud expertise of a trusted partner to navigate its deadline-driven digital transformation-and it ultimately turned to Navisite to achieve its goals.
With Navisite's help, WMG not only successfully migrated its legacy systems and applications out of the Burbank data center and onto the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud but did it ahead of its deadline. Today, with more than 110 optimized application and database servers running on the cloud, WMG is benefitting from improved efficiencies, security and management of IT operations.
3. Challenge: Rapid Business Growth-Aqua Finance Goes Cloud-Native with a Flexible and Scalable PaaSSolution
Aqua Finance, a provider of consumer financing programs that helps more than 5,000 dealers reach new customers, was experiencing exponential business and employee growth. As a result, the company was fast outpacing its inflexible hosting environment from a third-party provider.
Aqua Finance needed the help of experts to develop a modern, flexible blueprint for transitioning its business and critical applications to the cloud so it could cost-effectively scale resources up or down on demand and relieve the pressure on its IT staff. While moving to the cloud was a logical choice for Aqua Finance, the company's engineers didn't have the necessary experience to ensure security and high availability in the cloud, without putting the business at risk.
Aqua Finance turned to Navisite to achieve its goals-and Navisite's team of experts delivered by developing a multi-phased, three-year plan to achieve a cloud-native architecture with a platform as a service (PaaS) model based on Microsoft Azure.
Ultimately, by moving to a cloud-native environment, the Aqua Finance IT team could support the company's larger plans to double in size over the next five years with a flexible and scalable PaaS solution to securely manage growth-all without having to continually add staff or rehost the business. And, with the ongoing support of Navisite, Aqua Finance's IT team can focus on other high-value growth projects, instead of time-consuming operational tasks.
'Thanks to Navisite, we now have a cloud roadmap in place that sets us up for cost-effective growth and business agility, while protecting the integrity and performance of our systems and applications at every turn along the way,' said Jon Gelhaus, senior vice president of IT and CISO at Aqua Finance.
4. Challenge: Outdated Legacy Infrastructure-PFC Brakes Updates Aging Systems and Moves to the Cloud
As demand for Performance Friction Corporation (PFC) Brakes, a leading manufacturer of brakes and auto parts, and its products grew, its aging SAP R/3 solution could no longer keep up with the increasing pace of business. PFC Brakes struggled with decades of custom code, an insecure middleware vendor and an application system that kept crashing due to faulty integration. Oftentimes, this meant rebooting the SAP system multiple times a day. This put significant strain on the company's small IT staff, who spent a majority of their limited time fixing recurring issues.
To get ahead, PFC Brakes knew it was time to finally invest in a major application upgrade and move to a cloud-based environment that could keep up with daily demands. But with PFC Brakes' IT team already at capacity, making that kind of infrastructure change seemed complex and resource intensive.
PFC Brakes selected Navisite as its managed cloud services provider to replace the company's antiquated systems and, in turn, improve performance and reliability. With Navisite's help, PFC Brakes upgraded to SAP S/4HANA and executed an implementation on the AWS cloud. Today, PFC Brakes has a scalable, resilient and stable system that enables a substantial reduction in capital spending, while increasing reliability and performance.
5. Challenge: Data Management Complexity-Synclaire Eliminates Tedious, Manual Processes with Automation Projects
For almost a decade, Synclaire, a premier children's footwear provider in the U.S., had relied on Navisite as its managed service provider partner. Initially, Navisite was brought on to support Synclaire's IT environment with database administration (DBA) and business intelligence (BI) services. But soon after, Synclaire's CEO saw another opportunity: To streamline his growing business, he re-engaged Navisite for two data integration and automation projects tied to core business processes-customer invoicing and image catalog management.
Since Synclaire was already a Microsoft® SQL Server® customer, Navisite leveraged Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services to develop automated workflows and eliminate the need for tedious, complex and time-consuming manual methods. Today, what used to take the company up to three days to execute is now completed in a matter of hours. Additionally, by automating the processes, Synclaire has reduced the risk of human error and freed up its resources to focus on other initiatives.
'Beyond the ongoing support of our IT environment, Navisite's experts have continuously proven that their knowledge and experience in data integration and automation can support our most complex IT projects,' said Evan Cagner, chief executive officer of Synclaire Brands.
6.Challenge: Need for Expertise-Penske Australia and New Zealand Gets Off Stagnant ERP to Right-Sized Cloud Environment
Penske Australia and New Zealand, a subsidiary of the Penske Automotive Group, was at a crossroads for its IT solution. For years, Penske used the same Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) solution as its primary financial management system. But following an acquisition in 2014, Penske decided to move to a new, industry-specific ERP system-meaning the Oracle EBS application that thousands of Penske's employees had utilized for years would be sunset from regular use.
However, completely getting rid of the Oracle EBS solution wasn't an option. Australian tax laws mandated that Penske keep its tax invoices, purchase orders and other financial records stored in the old solution. But Penske also knew that keeping it on-premises would be too costly to maintain. To solve this problem, Penske needed to move its retired ERP solution onto another platform-but it didn't have the right in-house skills or expertise to make it happen.
Penske partnered with Navisite to move its Oracle EBS solution onto the AWS cloud, enabling a successful move off of expensive hardware and onto a cost-efficient and right-sized environment. The solution not only helped Penske overcome its staffing constraints and achieve its goals, but it also resulted in significant savings by eliminating hardware maintenance costs and reducing power consumption.
We've Got Your Back, No Matter What
These customer success stories only begin to paint a much larger picture of what it means to be a part of the Navisite community.
Whether you need help navigating rapid business change, modernizing outdated infrastructure or getting ahead of the unexpected, Navisite is a partner that businesses around the world rely on-no matter your IT challenge and no matter the stage of your digital transformation journey.
Learn more about what being a part of the Navisite community really means-and how we're relentless about our promise to be a partner you can always rely on.