Seamless Corporate Separation

Customer

A specialist provider of engineering, operations and maintenance services to the owners of energy assets around the world, employing a network of over 8500 people, working in over 26 countries.

Requirement

The customer had recently completed a management buyout from its parent company and required a client IT system to be separated from the parent company’s IT systems. With zero impact to the end user, Springmark maintained all systems and functionality with a seamless migration to the customer’s own IT systems without re-imaging or replacing existing client systems.

Solution

Using its in-depth understanding of the customer’s requirement – and in the absence of an ‘off-the-shelf’ migration solution – Springmark utilised its extensive experience in both migration and image creation to create a migration tool to fit the customer’s specific needs.

In addition, as the solution was to be deployed to all client systems around the world, the tool needed to be capable of migrating systems in any geographical location.

The basis of the automated migration solution:

• Reconfigure the client systems to the customer’s IT systems
• Maintain all functionality of the client systems post migration
• Ensure all user preferences and data where migrated
• Change licence keys in place to the customer’s licence keys
• Remove parent company software from all client systems and replace like for like with customer owned software
• Corporate brand all systems to the customer’s requirements
• Remove reliance on any parent company IT systems and replace with customer owned IT systems
• Design and implement a global customer owned software distribution mechanism for seamless migration
• Seamlessly migrate patch management to customer owned systems
• Replace parent company remote access solutions with customer based remote access solutions

At the customer’s request Springmark had a presence on site at the two main property locations (Scotland and Australia) during the migration phase. All migrations at the customer’s other global locations where carried out by business-as-usual IT staff, after being familiarised with the migration process during the initial wave of migrations in Scotland.

To provide ongoing day-to-day support, business-as-usual IT staff where provided with client images to allow systems to be re-imaged to the new corporate standard client configuration, which had been achieved via in place client systems using the migration tool. This process included custom created functionality to allow systems to be one click configured for any of the customer geographical locations during the image process right down to setting proofing tools.