The in-house IT subsidiary provides managed IT services to its parent company. This is made possible by a workforce of more than 30,000 employees and an annual turnover of over 7 billion euros. Over the last two decades, the company has become a significant player in the hosting of enterprise applications, such as SAP HANA or Oracle. The company operates its own data centres in Germany, which meet the highest compliance standards.
"Traditionally we used an outdated 3-tier storage platform,” the Executive Manager Infrastructure & Cloud Services describes the situation, "we needed to modernize a large part, but the mixed disk types and the lack of deep integration of automation processes made the process difficult. We feared we wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees, so we decided to get external help.”
"I had met Yves Sandfort at VMworld and attended one of his break-out sessions," he continued, "and since he had a depth of knowledge as a VCDX and lived relatively close to our headquarters, we invited him for a workshop".
"comdivision has strong relationships with almost all market-leading vendors in the VMware ecosystem," says Yves Sandfort. "With this in mind, we were asked to conduct an independent analysis of internal needs as well as market offerings."
"At comdivision, we always strive to see what is the best fit for the customer, even though we have strong ties to VMware," Sandfort continued, "but because of our deep knowledge, we also know where the weaknesses are." Sandfort explained. "Of course, every solution has strengths and weaknesses, it's all about matching them to our customer's needs."
For the customer, this was a new approach to getting an independent authority's opinion on the vendor's internal requirements and capabilities. Only afterwards a final Proof-Of-Concept and evaluation followed.
comdivision analysed the service provider's needs and created an evaluation catalogue. Based on this, each new storage platform could now be validated. "We reviewed the choices with the customer and then engaged with different providers to narrow the selection down to three options," Sandfort explains. "We then held joint meetings with the vendor and the customer and analysed them to a greater extent." Based on this, only two vendors were invited for a proof-of-concept before a final decision was made.
"comdivison dramatically reduced the workload of an infrastructure selection on our internal resources," said the customer. "We were able to continue to engage with customers while comdivision relieved us significantly and provided us with deeper insights at any point. Even during the PoC, they reduced the overhead and friction for us.”
Based on the experience gained, the customer plans to carry out further vendor analyses together with comdivision in the future.
