Description.
As a result of a critical outage, Rush University Systems for Health (RUSH) sought to refresh their entire data center from the ground up. As a component of the refresh, the Rush team also wanted to update its networking components from ACI to NSX. RUSH brought in AHEAD team to navigate the complicated multi-partner landscape, including VMware, Cisco, Dell, and IBM.
Refresh delivered within the hospital’s prescribed timeline
Genuine Parts Company sought a simpler and more streamlined process for fulfilling IT requests. AHEAD created an infrastructure automation roadmap, including VxRail Hyperconverged infrastructure and vRealize Automation (vRA), integrated it with software for extensibility, and built a ServiceNow service catalog to simplify the end user experience.
Much faster VM provisioning and repairs.
Northside Hospital is an extensive network of state-of-the-art facilities in Atlanta and Northeast Georgia. In late 2019, Northside and Gwinnett Health System completed plans to combine operations. AHEAD helped integrate their Exchange environments, implement ServiceNow into both companies, and modernize both companies’ Isilon storage environments.
Improved standardization and scalability; faster service delivery to the business
This tier one automotive supplier wanted a more resilient architecture and higher availability underpinning its Oracle ERP suite. We created a migration factory to move their application from Oracle VM to Oracle on VMware in a Vblock previously implemented by AHEAD.
Additionally, we integrated the environment with ServiceNow, VMware, and Ansible to produce an optimal provisioning solution.
Drastic reduction in server provisioning and disaster recovery processes
As a leading health system with approximately 17,000 beds, CHS has been a longtime ServiceNow user, but experienced challenges with platform adoption due to data cleanliness issues. AHEAD restructured the CMDB first by cleaning excess listings and data, then by developing and implementing a new naming protocol for assets. We also implemented discovery modules and integration of third-party tools to maintain proper CMDB hygiene going forward.
Improved efficiency in monitoring and management of IT.
As a very large organization, Allstate experienced heavy demand for virtual environments. Requests typically came in an ad-hoc manner with little visibility into the provisioning process, a process that involved several manual steps. AHEAD partnered with the insurance giant to deliver virtual machines in an automate, self-service manner, freeing up IT resources to support more innovative projects.
Faster provisioning of new business capabilities in support of innovation.
Committed to improving circumstances for those who are suffering from abuse, addiction, abandonment or violence, Boys Town sought innovative ways to deliver on that mission. But the provider had a history of manual IT processes and needed to deliver new patient services more rapidly. AHEAD partnered with Boys Town to deploy vRealize Automation and Orchestrator to deliver virtual machines in an automated manner, as well as utilize ServiceNow as the request mechanism capturing all configuration management details.
Faster delivery of new patient care services.
Over a six-month period, Nalco, the water division of Ecolab experienced timeout issues that not only hurt customer satisfaction but caused the company to reprocess 24,000 reports on behalf of customers. Ecolab brought in AHEAD to conduct a proof of concept, where we were able to quickly instrument the application in just two days, leading to the identification of 60% of the database timeout issues in that brief timespan.
Higher customer satisfaction based on more timely delivery of performance reporting; along with improved employee productivity for the Nalco team.
Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation couldn’t innovate due to slow processes, and the requirement to rely on a different agency for even simple server builds. Interagency disagreements over tools for cloud development and development hosting, compounded things. AHEAD helped create a model to facilitate sharing between agencies to improve trust, and centralize service deliver for common elements of the DevOps pipeline and infrastructure.
Better inter agency cooperation over cloud onboarding, development, and information sharing.
Schneider offers the broadest portfolio of transport and logistics services in the industry. Facing market pressure to provide smart phone apps and more competitive pricing, the company partnered with AHEAD to rethink its critical orders acceptance application and address issues of over-complexity for obtaining infrastructure, and cloud platform rationalization in the process. AHEAD built a robust containers platform encompassing networking, storage, and monitoring, including integration with CloudBees Jenkins and Xebia Labs release automation.
New order management application providing an edge in the highly competitive logistics industry.
Medtronic is committed to transforming health care. But the company’s digital platform was falling behind in the marketplace. And like many companies competing on innovation, the firm faced tool and cloud provider proliferation, and longer than acceptable lead times for fixes and new features. AHEAD partnered with Medtronic to standardize on a single CI/CD process focused on Azure DevOps and to introduce a new DevOps culture to bridge infrastructure and development teams, all while simplifying processes.
Dramatic improvements in time to deliver new software, and a new culture in IT emphasizing accountability and collaboration.
One of the most recognized brands in the world, Red Bull faced multiple challenges in delivering better software faster. Disconnects between infrastructure and apps teams, as well as between ServiceNow and Jenkins, led this brand to refocus on its DevOps journey. AHEAD stitched together a new development environment of CloudBees, Terraform, Chef, and ServiceNow to streamline software delivery, and just as important, create a more streamlined and accountable IT culture capable of innovating faster.
Dramatic reductions in time to deliver new software, and a new culture in IT emphasizing accountability and collaboration.
AdvantEdge Analytics provides data and analytics to credit unions across the U.S., but deploying its services was too time consuming and resource intensive. Furthermore, credit unions frequently lack analytical scale and talent, so AdvantEdge had to differentiate its analytics services by making them more accessible and actionable. The solution was an advanced automation solution involving Azure, Chef, Palo Alto, Meraki, and ServiceNow resulting in a new, cloud-based analytics offering, and onboarding times that dropped from a month down to a couple of days.
A first-of-its-kind digital business offering, and improved customer experience for credit union clients.
Facing a rapidly changing regulatory environment, ECMC needed a more on demand, agile compute platform. Constrained by limited resources and a looming Oracle enterprise license renewal, this financial services company for higher education partnered with AHEAD to decompose a complex Oracle environment and migrate more than 500 servers and 66 application workloads to AWS, generating significant savings on software licenses in the process.
Significant savings in software licensing and a more agile and flexible compute environment.
Providing steel and aluminum products for the commercial food service industry, Vollrath has long been ahead of the curve in terms of growth. But technical debt was weighing down the company and putting it at risk of being passed by the competition. Working with AHEAD, the company deployed a converged infrastructure solution, drastically reducing hardware costs and downtime, while improving their ability to scale up in support of new acquisitions.
Dramatic reduction in time it takes to deliver new business services as well as support new business unit innovations.
Rockwell’s mission is to improve the quality of it customers’ lives by making the world more productive and sustainable. But the IT organization at Rockwell was having difficulty deploying temporary environments, with virtual environments taking far too long to reach its customers. The firm partnered with AHEAD on a hybrid cloud solution, including VMware vRealize Suite adapted using automation and orchestration for Windows and Linux. The resulting environment could much more readily respond to customer demands.
Dramatic reduction in provisioning of new business services.
Like many organizations, this leading academical medical institution had initially deployed ServiceNow, but was not set up to fully realize the business value of this platform. UCMC brought in AHEAD to rethink the business and governance processes around the platform, refresh the underlying architecture within ServiceNow, and redeploy the platform. Through automated response and remediation, UCMC freed up service desk resources and dramatically cut mean time to resolve, all while incident volume and requests grew, representing higher engagement with clinicians and staff.
Improved mean time to resolve issues and fulfill requests, combined with lower resource desk hours.
Downtime in healthcare IT systems is not an option, as patient well-being is at stake. Facing an aging and costly IT infrastructure, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s uptime was being severely compromised resulting in an immediate need to modernize the data center and beyond. By partnering with AHEAD to streamline an environment that included five different storage types and seven different server types, Wake’s availability improved while it’s maintenance and support costs dropped from 44% of their budget down to 10%.
Lower maintenance costs freed up funding for more innovation that directly benefits the patient experience.
The acquisition of close to 500 insurance brokers over the past twenty years created an infrastructure sprawl that hurt HUB’s ability to serve customers, respond to market changes, and continue to grow through acquisition. AHEAD helped architect a new AWS-based infrastructure, including mapping business applications to AWS services and defining new networking requirements. After migrating 380 VMs (and eliminating 800 others) HUB can much more quickly integrate new acquisitions without acquiring legacy technology.
Faster acquisitions and integration of brokers, without the baggage of on-premises infrastructure.
An early pioneer in the public cloud, global investment firm BAM faced rising cloud costs and a lack of visibility into its AWS operations. Being in financial services, the firm also required a mechanism to ensure continuous compliance of the environment. Deploying its CoPilot Cloud Optimization and Governance Solution, AHEAD provided ongoing analysis of AWS performance, enabling BAM to monitor compliance every 15 minutes and dramatically improve its compliance posture. BAM projects 20% savings based on rightsizing and reserved instance recommendations from CoPilot alone.
Improved regulatory compliance and performance monitoring, plus significant savings on AWS
As one of the nation’s largest combined electric and natural gas companies, Consumers Energy is obsessed with the customer experience. To allow the business to delivery new forms of service and drive customer satisfaction, the IT leadership team new it needed to step up its own customer service game and deliver services more quickly and in a self-service manner. The AHEAD team helped design a hybrid cloud environment, including a robust service catalog, in just six months.
Improved customer satisfaction and empowerment, with both end customers and internal business stakeholders.
BGD prides itself in working collaboratively with clients to help them achieve their business goals. The firm believes that combining the experiences, knowledge, and ideas from individuals with different backgrounds allows them to provide their clients with innovative and effective solutions. But the firm’s IT infrastructure didn’t support that vision. AHEAD partnered with BGD to arc a new infrastructure environment that supported better collaboration across the firm’s professionals as well as with its clients.
Improved responsiveness and higher availability client insights, enabling lawyers to provide world class service to clients.
As a firm that excels at helping clients manage business risks, Navigant faced a material risk of its own when the firm lost a data center to divestiture, and a key piece of its disaster recovery program in the process. Navigant partnered with AHEAD to find a DR solution quickly to satisfy client obligations, and more cost effectively meet those needs using public cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS. Navigant now has a more scalable yet cost effective DR solution, including a unified management view that simplifies operations.
One less data center and a more robust and cost-effective DR environment.
