A major acquisition meant this global brand with billions in revenue needed help to migrate its data center applications.

When a global Fortune 500 company needed help migrating data center applications and integrating infrastructure components after a major acquisition, CDW Professional and Managed Services provided the strategy, deployment and ongoing operations for a smooth transition — and long-term business success. 

Additionally, as part of the acquisition, CDW also helped the company integrate applications and systems at more than 30 new international locations.

With critical functions migrated in less than 12 months, the company avoided steep overage fines and continued doing business without interruption. “We helped them pull off an extremely complex migration without a single incident of unplanned downtime,” says John Chancellor, manager of CDW Managed Services.

Starting from Scratch

The acquisition doubled the size of the $3 billion company, yet it did not include any data center infrastructure or infrastructure support staff, only some scattered legacy systems (which were sometimes unsupported) and network hardware at globally distributed manufacturing sites. 

If that wasn’t enough, the acquiring company was in the process of moving its own corporate headquarters and current data center. 

“They didn’t have the time, staff or expertise to take on another large migration project,” says Dan Geisler, a CDW professional services manager. “CDW was able to deliver all those things on a broad level for both the migration and ongoing operational support.” 

Already a CDW customer, the company hired CDW Professional Services to help design and manage the separation of the purchased company's IT infrastructure, the migration into the established environment, and the deployment of CDW Managed Services to run subsequent operations in a CDW data center. 

As part of the transaction agreement, all core applications and database systems  — including  more than 140 servers with 37 applications and 100 databases that made up core financial, ERP, manufacturing systems and departmental applications — would have to be moved to the CDW data center within a year to avoid steep monthly overage fines to the selling company for ongoing support and service (an agreement that was imposed in the divesture).   

To make things even more complex, the parent of the acquired company would not allow CDW to access existing systems directly for security reasons. Thus, all the information required for migration would have to come from interviews with key departmental and IT contacts. Language issues with international locations, including China and Mexico, were particularly challenging.

Over nine months, CDW conducted extensive analyses with migration deployment. “We had to understand exactly how each department worked every day and month to month, including during critical times, all the applications they worked with, and which data and systems the acquiring company would need to function,” says Steve Mocilnikar, a CDW professional services manager. 

Designing a secure data center and migration process was critical for achieving signoff. “The project needed a lot of CDW facilitation and design tweaking to convince the acquiring company that the process would be safe and nondisruptive to business,” Geisler says. All migrated operating systems, directories, desktops and apps had to be reconfigured or reimaged to comply with the acquiring company’s IT standards and requirements while also ensuring that acquired staff could continue to work without interruption. 

“Good communication with users was essential so each group would know which help desk to call and how to log in to their systems at every point in the migration,” says CDW Program Manager Jackie Ramin.

CDW started with the migration of less critical functions and applications, moving toward more critical systems as wrinkles were gradually ironed out of the process. “We developed a schedule that allowed manufacturing in Asia and Mexico to continue uninterrupted while applications were migrated in the United States,” Mocilnikar says. “By the time we got to the critical systems, we had the entire process down.”

The project also included building compute, storage and networking infrastructure in the colocated CDW data center. 

“We do all the hard work of sourcing and configuring complete systems from the manufacturers,” Chancellor says. “For hardware, we went with a hyperconverged FlexPod architecture that we had experience and expertise installing successfully in more than a thousand customer sites.” 

The CDW data center also provided business continuity for the acquiring company's own primary data center.

A Successful Handoff

As each individual migration was completed, CDW Managed Services took over long-term management of data center operations, including stabilizing and modernizing the environment. “Delegating operations to CDW allowed the customer to transition the acquisition gradually to its own enterprise resource planning solution without having to hire staff to maintain existing servers and applications,” Geisler says. 

The result? A highly successful migration and modernization over 15 months, with all critical systems moved within the one-year time frame, thanks to CDW’s expertise and resources the company could not possibly muster on its own. “We were able to contribute 70 CDW experts, including technical engineers, storage and compute experts, managed services business analysts, database and operating system specialists, and project and program managers,” Chancellor says. 

In fact, the CIO has gone on record saying that there was no way the  company could have met the deadline without the assistance and support of CDW. Using CDW resources allowed it to focus on core business projects, enhancing its agility and competitive position. “The company's stock went up almost 50 percent during the process,” Geisler says.