The in-house IT subsidiary provides managed IT services to their parent organization with more than 30.000 employees and more than €7 billion revenue. During the last 20 years, they grew to become a major player in enterprise application hosting, such as SAP HANA or Oracle.
They operate their own datacenters in Germany, conforming with the highest compliance standards.
This customer operates a constantly growing infrastructure with often very manual deployment procedures. Onboarding of internal and external customers, or even individual workloads, was often taking weeks or even months. “This is the challenge most legacy enterprises face” said Yves Sandfort, comdivision's lead architect on the case “while these large organizations strive to be as innovative as their start-up competitors, it’s often a crude-oil tanker compared to a speed boat that the start-ups are able use: legacy vs. Cloud offerings!”
The Executive Manager Infrastructure and Cloud Services explained further “in our meetings with Yves and his team, we identified that the lack of internal self-service was an additional gap requiring lengthy ordering processes for even simplistic tasks”.
comdivision helped this customer to evaluate different options from VMware such as vRealize Automation and vCloud Director, as well as some other Cloud management platforms. “We try to keep an open mind about all different solutions, not just VMware”, said Sandfort, “but based on the large VMware install base and existing knowledge at this customer it became clear, that vRealize Automation is the best solution for this use case.”
comdivision provided primarily design, project management and knowledge transfer, while the customer was able to customize and develop the target platform primarily by themselves, ensuring that operations can be accomplished without external help.
Providing a self-service portal enables internal customers to provision services fully automated on demand. A complex automation system allows this provider to deploy automatically, at the correct place in the infrastructure, which saves days to weeks in the process. Integration of exciting deployment tools and processes could be highly automated to speed up the process further. Besides self-service, an API was provided to integrate the process into the internal order management system.
In a next phase, this service provider likes to engage with comdivision about the integration of external Cloud solutions on the Hyperscalers to allow expansion and deeper integration for their customers.
