Aerospace Distribution Company Global Infrastructure Remediation
Background
This client has a 40+ year history of providing hardware products to companies in the aerospace and defense industries. The E.L.I. Partner was brought in by a private equity group soon after they acquired the customer in a carve-out from a public company. At the time, the firm employed some 300 individuals in 2 major domestic US locations, 1 major European facility, and at a half-dozen forward-stocking locations near major customers around the world. Annual sales were roughly $250 million.
Situation
The E.L.I. Partner was engaged to separate the new company’s systems infrastructure from the prior parent and establish an independent, world-class, global infrastructure environment for the new firm — from networking to client end devices to servers and storage. Upon beginning the engagement, the E.L.I. Partner immediately determined that the original due diligence conducted on behalf of the new purchasers was seriously flawed. Their assessment and findings significantly underestimated the time that would be required to separate the client from its former parent at the infrastructure level. It also fell far short in estimating the cost and time required to establish an independent, up-to-date infrastructure environment. Indeed, the estimate fell short by several hundreds of thousands of dollars, a miss of roughly 50%, and by multiple man-months of separation and remediation effort.
The E.L.I. Partner’s task was to perform an independent assessment of the company’s current infrastructure situation, develop a set of recommendations that met the new firm’s going-forward business requirements, design an infrastructure architecture that would encompass multiple company locations, both domestic and international, and create a budget and a project plan that would get the job done properly — all this in a context that was highly time-constrained and extremely cost-sensitive.
Solution
The E.L.I. Partner performed the assessment and analysis described above, presented the findings to the firm’s new owners, along with a timeline and a revised budget to complete the work, and secured their approval to move forward with implementing a plan to establish a new, current-generation, independent global infrastructure architecture. Specifically, this involved the following, thorough infrastructure overhaul:
- Replace end-of-service-life, legacy servers with a current-generation Windows Server infrastructure
- Build an independent Windows Active Directory domain environment
- Establish an enterprise storage and document collaboration platform
- Conduct a comprehensive desktop and laptop refresh, implementing current generation Windows and Office products in place of the legacy Windows NT/XP and Office 2000/2003 environment
- Migrate from an on-premises legacy email environment to a cloud-hosted Exchange service
- Establish a new network core and edge, leveraging Cisco routing, switching, and firewall products
- Implement fault tolerance and failover at all levels of the new environment: ISP circuits, routers, aggregation switches, firewalls, domain controllers, and storage
- Build out new infrastructure environments at all remote, domestic US and global locations
- Implement an enterprise-wide, centrally-managed secure wireless capability
- Establish secure links between the firm’s headquarters and all remote sites using Cisco site-to-site VPN technology
Results
Even with a constrained budget and timeline, the E.L.I. Partner was able to completely separate the new firm from all dependencies on the former parent company within the timeframe required by the original separation agreement. And the project met the revised budget forecast. The E.L.I. Partner oversaw the training of the IT team, ensuring they were able to support the new environment with minimum outside assistance. The new infrastructure has not experienced a major systems failure or outage since implementation and the company continues to engage the E.L.I. Partner for occasional guidance as required.
