Longview Partners|Financial services

Summary

Objective

As well as wanting to modernise its IT systems and processes, Longview Partners was looking to get more value from data. That would involve moving from legacy, on-premise solutions to Azure and Office 365.

Solution

• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Office 365
• Microsoft Windows 10
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Exchange 365
• Microsoft Azure VPN
• Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop
• Migration testing with Azure Site Recovery
• Coeo Dedicated Support

Results

• Users could work seamless from home during Covid-19 lockdown
• An enhanced user experience
• Longview Partners can focus on the next stage of its modernisation plans, while Coeo handles the everyday support of the Azure environment

Founded in 2001, Longview Partners is a specialist asset management firm focused entirely on the management of global portfolios. The business recognised that they needed a modern IT solution to compete in a fast moving industry and serve their staff well, in order to deliver against one of their key principles; “Longview will always be a rewarding, challenging and team-orientated place to work”. The leadership team recruited Paul Jones, who had previous experience of successfully transforming IT Services into the cloud, as Head of Technology to modernise their approach to delivering IT to business users.

Learning & understanding

The challenge

Paul wanted to challenge the way that IT had been delivered to business users. They were frustrated with the time it took to provide new apps and services, the performance of the systems and the ability to use the data they had available.

We worked with Paul to create a vision of future IT Services; one that is more responsive, provides applications that are easy to use, challenges the business to change and empowers users to make better decisions. It was agreed that several immediate changes could be implemented to improve the user experience:

• Replace aging end user compute
• Migrate from the on[1]premises data centre running
• Legacy hardware and software to Azure and O365
• Modernise the application, taking advantage of PaaS services
• Build a new enterprise[1]wide analytics

Implementation

The solution

“The first step in the transformation was to replace the end user compute. This had a few benefits: the version of Windows could be upgraded to version 10 to allow easier integration with modern services, the users benefited from new hardware – so felt like they were being invested in – and some of the legacy platforms could quickly be migrated to O365 because the latest versions of Office could be deployed onto the hardware.

Migrating out of the on[1]premises data centre was the next phase. We worked collaboratively with Paul’s team, making extensive use of Microsoft Teams. As much of this work was completed during lockdown, this meant that the work could continue, despite everyone working remotely from home.

“ Transitioning the service to Coeo and the stability and opportunities for improvement it will bring is something I’ve been looking forward to since I joined Longview last year and started this roadmap.” Paul Jones, Head of Technology, Longview

Some of the critical applications had complex underlying infrastructure requirements designed for an on-premises world. It was possible to replicate the infrastructure services in Azure and this will be a great foundation to allow future innovation to be developed from.

The complexity and inter[1]dependencies between the applications meant that the migration had to be performed in one go. This meant that everything had to go right, first time. To ensure the success of the migration we made extensive use of Azure Site Recovery to test the migration over and over until everyone was satisfied that every scenario had been fully tested and ready for the big day. Our experience of performing these types of migration and approach to risk management gave the Longview Partners team confidence that such a critical operation would be conducted efficiently and successfully.