CLIENT – INDUSTRY VERTICAL
Financial Services; Transportation. Company based in Southern Florida, with distributed offices in the region – as well as subsidiaries throughout the United States/ Internationally – and offering a diverse portfolio of physical and financial assets for the transportation industry.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
United Data Technologies (UDT) is currently supporting several large-scale IT business projects for this Financial Services/Transportation Industry Client based in Southern Florida. Among these critical initiatives is a large Microsoft Azure migration, representing the migration and upgrade of workloads from approximately 100 – 150 on-premises (“on-prem” servers to Microsoft Azure. While a very large project, it is the smallest of several expansive IT initiatives currently underway (*as of Calendar Q1 2019) for this important UDT client, including Microsoft Office 365 migrations, Microsoft Active Directory consolidation, and building a complete Data Warehouse in Azure (cloud-based data warehouse).
Financial Services/Transportation Industry Client has requested that the Azure migrations be undertaken to centralize the company’s distributed offices.
- Deal Size: Approximately 100-150 servers migrated to MS Azure services
- Vertical/Region: Financial Services/ Transportation; Southern Florida (and nationwide)
CO-SELL OPPORTUNITY
United Data Technologies (UDT) is a Microsoft Gold-competency Partner. UDT’s project for this Financial Services/ Transportation Industry Client, and all Microsoft Azure migration initiatives, represent the utilization of Azure to deliver, overall, more efficient, scalable, cost-effective solutions that work with, or significantly lower cost and burden from, existing IT investments. It also enables the support of “related (Microsoft) products, services, and third-party applications…” from “DevOps to business analytics to the Internet of Things,” as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
REASONS FOR AZURE MIGRATION
“PROOF POINTS”
- A charter was initiated by the Chief Technology Officer for UDT’s Financial Services/Transportation Industry Client to achieve more efficiency in the transportation provision. As an example, according to this charter, one percent (1%) increases in efficiency in this provision equals approximately $1 million in bottom line revenue increase per physical transportation asset. Advanced technology services – modernizing processes and reducing IT sprawl — including centralized Microsoft Azure Cloud solutions could, it was/is put forth by Microsoft, by The Client’s team and UDT’s team, contribute significantly to achieving these efficiencies.
- UDT’s Financial Services/Transportation Industry Client’s Chief Technology Officer indicated that the organization wanted to increase efficiencies and reduce costs by moving to (current) “mainstream technology” – i.e. cloud services – and not be beholden to costly hardware refreshes.
- As part of the modernization initiative, The Client’s technology group and UDT’s team identified that multiple company sites had/have aging hardware with limited storage capacity, with significant need for IT refreshes required. The “mainstream technology” transformation would reduce those costs and significantly increase business and IT efficiencies.
UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS
- UDT’s Financial Services/ Transportation Industry Client is partially publicly traded, requiring Sarbanes-Oxley and other federal, state and local financial compliance. UDT’s Microsoft Azure migration would create efficiencies for data/information storage and retrieval for compliance reporting.
- New services through Azure would consolidate Microsoft Active Directory (AD), which stores information about objects on the network and makes this information easy for administrators and users to find and use; taking, for example, three (3) AD4 schemas for different subsidiaries and moving them, utilizing Azure, to a single schema.
- UDT’s Azure migration project commenced within two (2) months of initial planning for the overall Financial Services/Transportation Industry Client’s IT modernization initiative. It followed a complete server inventory, identifying which physical, on-prem servers, located in the company’s headquarters and subsidiary offices, would be utilized or retired. As of this writing, the overall project is at, approximately, the mid-point, with some workloads currently in production.
