SoftwareOne Supports M&A and Digital Workplace Strategies
Major trends in business, including the rise of the digital workplace, as well as mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are all driving increased demand for cloud migrations. And SoftwareOne is right in the middle of it all. As a technology services provider and consultancy, SoftwareOne helps companies modernize their IT environments, and provides them with implementation support to increase productivity and efficiency. Chris Chesley leads SoftwareOne’s digital workplace practice for USA and Canada. He recently sat down with BitTitan to talk about how MigrationWiz helps them deliver for their customers. As technology has evolved, so have the capabilities of the digital workplace. The basic concept – providing employees with secure access to the data they need, any time, and on any device – still felt somewhat futuristic before Covid. “Suddenly, the office was no longer a viable option,” Chris said. “Companies had to scramble to keep their employees productive. That really highlighted the benefits of Office 365 and Google Workplace.” And moving to the cloud is the best way to make the digital workplace a reality. Chris and his team have been using MigrationWiz for more than six years to help their customers migrate to the cloud or between cloud tenants. And the demand isn’t slowing down. Companies have fundamentally changed the way they work, and challenges of the digital workplace continue to evolve. “Now we’re seeing companies with what we call a patchwork workplace. They’ve got four or five different tools, and that makes the environment hard to manage,” said Chris. His team helps customers design and build a more integrated environment.
Mergers and acquisitions and SoftwareOne
Mergers and acquisitions also drive a lot of business for SoftwareOne. “M&A activity continues to increase, and the problem for our customers is bandwidth,” said Chris. “The IT team already has day jobs, and suddenly they have to merge or divest a company.” They need help. Chris’s team has the tools and expertise to migrate users quickly with minimal disruption, and get them up and running on their new platform. A large hydraulic equipment company is a SoftwareOne customer that’s following a strategy of growth through acquisition. They’ve bought a handful of companies over the last two years, and have needed to absorb 250 to 350 employees at a time. Key to their strategy is making sure employees become part of the company as soon as possible so they can start contributing immediately. “We get them a new email address on day one so they can start using it while we’re working in the background to get historical data moved over. With MigrationWiz we can pre-stage data so it can be moved quickly and users don’t experience any downtime,” said Chris. Of course, not every merger or acquisition is the same. MigrationWiz allows Chris’s team to customize each migration to suit the needs of the customer. “For some M&A migrations, the customer wants us to move the executives first. In other cases, there’s a desire to move IT first to make sure everything goes as expected. We can easily customize MigrationWiz to target specific groups of users,” said Chris.
More than just a migration tool
SoftwareOne is also working with a medical device company to help them divest a large division. It’s a complex project that is expected to take months to complete. MigrationWiz is just a component in an overall project that includes application migration and adoption change management. “Doing the migration is actually very easy,” said Chris. “We can switch users from Google Workspace to OneDrive, but if they don’t know how to use the tools to be productive, we’ve missed a very important part of the migration.” Communicating with users about why the change is happening and teaching them how to use their new platform is a major benefit Chris and his team provide. SoftwareOne and BitTitan make a good team because of their shared focus on making things easy for customers. Chris outlined a few of the ways MigrationWiz helps his team deliver for their customers. “With MigrationWiz we don’t need to have a different tool for different workloads. I’ve got one tool to grab all of the data,” he said. Chris also uses DeploymentPro to point each user’s mailbox from the old tenant to the new tenant. “Without DeploymentPro it would be very time consuming – and expensive – to write a custom script that redirects everybody. DeploymentPro is an automated tool that we can set up ahead of time,” said Chris.
It’s the people that make MigrationWiz work
MigrationWiz is the go-to migration tool whenever SoftwareOne has to assist a customer with a migration. “One of the things I like best about BitTitan is that my team and BitTitan’s technical development team are very tightly tied together. We very often call them and let them know about something we’ve run into and we recommend changes that we’d like to see,” said Chris. The BitTitan technical team will often build out a new feature based on a partner recommendation. It’s this kind of collaboration that assures MigrationWiz continues to meet the evolving needs of fast-moving companies. To hear more from Chris Chesley at SoftwareOne, you can view the video of our interview.
