The Situation
nGenera is a mid-sized business centered in the technology industry based out of Mountain View, California. With over 800 customers worldwide, including 200 of the world’s largest enterprises, nGenera delivers complete solutions for both employee and customer engagement. With a combination of services and software, nGenera works directly with customers to help create a customized Enterprise collaboration strategy. Kenny Boudreaux, a Systems Engineer at nGenera, discovered they were spending a significant amount of time and money on maintaining existing systems and wanted a better way to manage the growing number of Exchange accounts. With multiple locations to serve, a Blackberry integration to contend with and a current on-premise Exchange solution of two mailbox servers and two gateway servers in Austin, Texas and Bellevue, Washington, nGenera felt the timing could not have been better to simplify their infrastructure and reduce cost with a cloud solution.
The Solution
Microsoft Exchange Online is part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite accessible through Microsoft Online Services. Exchange Online offers improved email security, “anywhere” access to e-mail for employees, enhanced operational efficiency for IT staff and twenty-five gigabytes in mailbox storage per standard license.
According to Boudreaux, the two factors involved in the decision to migrate were: the cost savings the cloud provides and the flexibility it affords the IT department in order to manage and grow the business.
“Our IT team was spread pretty thin,” says Boudreaux. “We have our own hosted offerings! And we wanted more time to focus on [our customer environments].”
Prior to migration, Boudreaux knew the scheduling process was going to be demanding. This was a big change for nGenera due to the multiple acquisitions since 2007. With an acquisition occurring in the middle of the migration, the complexity of having disparate accounts challenged the IT department. This situation required a complex communication plan to notify the change to all onsite, mobile and diversely located end users.
Vorsite and nGenera teamed up to tackle this large task. Vorsite built the communication plan containing information on expected outages, potential issues and what to expect with the migration, in addition to recommending coexistence of both the on-premises and cloud solution during the migration process. The recommended setup allowed the migration process to begin systematically and over a period of weeks and the team migrated over 250 gigabytes of data from two on-premises mailbox servers to Exchange Online.
“As soon as you make that switch! The connection happens immediately to the new mailbox,” says Boudreaux.
As a result, all users from disparate accounts were aligned beneath a single active directory. This provides a better communication system for nGenera’s onsite employees, in addition to building improved connections to their mobile workforce.
