AvePoint Fly Server Helps Computacenter Migrate Newly Acquired Company’s Users
Success Highlights
Customer Location Hertfordshire, England
Industry Information Technology
Platform Microsoft 365
Computacenter is a leading independent technology partner that helps large corporate and public sector organizations around the world to deliver digital transformation. They enable customer success through the sourcing, transformation, and management of their technology infrastructure. With over 18,000 employees worldwide, Computacenter has a global, 24-hour service desk and provides consultancy sales and managed services to more than 15,000 businesses.
Critical Needs
- Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migration
- Migration of 1,000 users’ entire workloads
- Quick project timeline
- Detailed pre-discovery reporting
The Challenge
In 2019, Computacenter purchased a mid-sized, North American managed service provider (MSP) called Pivot Technology Services. Once the deal was done, they needed to integrate the new company into their infrastructure.
As part of the integration, Computacenter needed to migrate 1,000 people from their newly acquired MSP, who all used Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, to Computacenter’s tenant.
The team also needed the migration to happen quickly, lest their investment go to waste. They needed to get the new company integrated as part of the Computacenter infrastructure fast to ensure added value from their acquisition.
It’s fair to say that companies will always merge and be acquired. There needs to be a coherent tool that customers can use that covers all their bases. And AvePoint’s is an ideal tool to do that.
Principal Consultant of Computacenter’s Workplace and Collaboration Team
The AvePoint Solution
Luckily, the service and solution provider had internal resources that could help. The company is split into two main buckets: sales and services & solutions. On the services & solutions side, they have a consultancy arm, who have helped many organizations with migration projects in the past.
In fact, Tosh Yusaf, Principal Consultant, Workplace and Collaboration Team, and his colleague Tony Romano, a technical consultant on Tosh’s team, are experts in migration. They estimate having helped their customers migrate hundreds of thousands of Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites between them. Through their customers, they have experience using a wide array of migration tools, including AvePoint’s Fly Server.
For their migration project, they narrowed it down to three possible providers. “We created a matrix of potential providers, including Quest, CloudMigrator, and AvePoint,” Tosh explains. “We then gave everyone an equal chance to tell us what they can do and how soon they could do it. We planned about 9 months for the entire project. Our ideal solution would be a proven tool that could get us up and running quickly for a reasonable price.”
AvePoint’s Fly Server was the clear winner; the others were either too complicated or had questionable scalability. Tony also had a lot of experience migrating SharePoint sites with AvePoint’s Fly for his customers, to the point he deems himself an evangelist for AvePoint’s migration tools. He felt his familiarity using AvePoint’s solutions and the good relationship they had with their customer success manager would help them achieve a quick, seamless migration.
Once they received their servers, it took them about 3 days to start collecting data and get their pilot up and running, which the team deemed a big success, particularly for the size of the migration.
Transferring entire workloads, from identity data to applications, is complicated. Overall, it took them four months to migrate the data from one tenant to the other. “We could have moved faster,” Tosh says, “but some other complexities slowed us down. We were limited to moving about 50 or 60 users per night.”
Of the tool, Tosh says, “It does extremely well, and it’s extremely dependable. It fits into whatever migration strategy you create. The tool sits in the middle and can coordinate the entire migration process.”
The Road Ahead
Computacenter’s effort to migrate their newly acquired company into their infrastructure was “a lot simpler than I thought it would be,” according to Tosh. “It’s fair to say that companies will always merge and be acquired. There needs to be a coherent tool that customers can use that covers all their bases. And AvePoint’s is an ideal tool to do that.”
The consultancy team uses Fly with their own clients frequently. Tony explains, “It’s really the best value for your money. Our customers love it because we can set it up for them, and they can run it themselves.”
Computacenter’s experts in migration offer this advice to others starting this process: “Be truthful about your scope and get some reporting on it. The earlier you see problems, the sooner you can deal with them. You don’t want to go into a migration thinking you have 200 users to migrate and then realize there are a thousand deleted users with data you need that can’t just be discarded. Fly’s reporting tool gives you this information and turns you into someone who has done this before and can handle it, like us.”
Thanks to their strong relationship with AvePoint and the training they received as part of the partnership, such as opportunities to shadow, Computacenter can speak confidently to their customers about the AvePoint solutions and help more people achieve successful, seamless migrations.
