Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Coffey International Integrates Disparate Systems With Comprehensive Server Solution SolutionSServeSolutionprehensive Server Solution
Overview
Country or Region:Australia
Industry: Engineering
Customer Profile
Coffey International provides engineering consulting services, and international development and construction project management. It has 32 offices in Australia and an additional 15 worldwide. It has 1,700 staff and in 2005 generated revenue of A$170 million.
Business Situation
Coffey’s strategy of growth through acquisition resulted in a large number of disparate, disconnected systems. The company realized it needed to implement common systems to support its ongoing expansion.
Solution
Coffey installed a range of Microsoft server products to integrate IT operations across the company and encourage collaboration.
Benefits
Knowledge sharing and collaboration
Centralized e-mail and calendaring
Easy-to-manage solution
Strong platform for growth / “When we installed the Microsoft technology, there was massive growth in knowledge sharing and collaboration.”
Clive Parsons, Chief Information Officer, Coffey International
An aggressive growth strategy and acquisition program left engineering and development consultancy, Coffey International, with a multitude of disparate systems and a workforce that found it difficult to communicate efficiently across business units. Without a central operating platform, the acquired businesses remained in disconnected IT silos, meaning Coffey could not benefit from economies of scale. As the company continued to grow, Coffey recognized the importance of providing common systems to support its expansion. It hired a CIO who set about building a central IT department and creating a centralized technology environment for the whole business. Based on a range of Microsoft server products, Coffey’s new IT infrastructure is boosting staff and client collaboration, improving knowledge and document sharing, and providing mobile data access to staff on the move.
Situation
Coffey International builds “hard” infrastructure such as roads, dams, and buildings. It also creates the social building blocks—such as education, sanitation, security, agriculture, and health—that are at the core of communities.
The company’s engineering consulting division provides services in Australia and South-East Asia. This division advises on environmental engineering projects and works with chemical distributors and mining companies to ensure the safety of their operations.
Coffey also manages international development projects. It works with governments and organizations such as the World Bank to provide skills to developing nations. For example, it is currently using its expert project management skills to assist Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and is helping to deploy an e-government project in the Maldives. Coffey employs some of the world’s foremost project managers who manage construction projects in regions including Vietnam and Dubai.
Coffey’s products are its people’s skills, knowledge, and experience. To expand its product range, Coffey must acquire companies with new people and skill sets. Since it was founded in 1959, Coffey has grown to have 32 offices in Australia and an additional 15 worldwide. It boasts 1,700 staff and 1,000 PCs. In 2005, Coffey generated revenue of A$170 million.
“Our projects are all about improving people’s lives,” says Clive Parsons, Chief Information Officer at Coffey International. “As we grow, and we’re growing very fast, it’s vital that we maintain the capabilities to encourage excellent communication across the organization and provide intuitive access to our knowledge.”
Fast growth fuelled by acquisition has a downside. Each company Coffey acquired over the years had its own technology systems and environments. Many of these needed to be upgraded or replaced.
Coffey found itself with 25 file-and-print servers running Mandrake Linux, six messaging servers running Sendmail or Qmail on Linux, and several servers running the Windows NT® 4.0 operating system, which was no longer supported.
The lack of a standard operating platform meant Coffey had no way of ensuring version control in documents and suffered from poor system availability. In addition, as Coffey is structured as a series of geographically distributed businesses, a lot of information was not readily accessible to the rest of the company.
Encouraging communication between experts in different offices was difficult. The different businesses remained in technology silos, with collaboration and knowledge-sharing happening on an ad hoc rather than systematic basis. Staff in one office often didn’t know whom they needed to contact in another office or how to get in touch with them.
Coffey’s energetic acquisition program needed to achieve economies of scale but, to achieve this, it needed to build and deploy a standard technology environment across the rapidly growing enterprise.
The company also needed a centralized way to manage IT operations. The first step was to hire a Chief Information Officer (CIO) and build an IT team.
Enter Clive Parsons, a seasoned IT professional with experience managing large data centers for multinational corporations with operations across the Asia-Pacific region.
“When I arrived at Coffey, no one believed the organization could maintain a comprehensive technology environment,” he says.
“Coming from a series of smaller companies, staff had low expectations of what IT could deliver. They accepted things that staff in larger organizations would not have tolerated,” he adds.
Parsons drew up his requirements for a technology solution that would support each business unit’s needs and provide a strong, unified platform for growth. The system needed to give staff the ability to collaborate, access information remotely, and share knowledge across the company. The infrastructure also needed to be easy to use and deploy, and to require minimal support and maintenance.
“Coffey’s main driver for implementing this IT strategy was to keep things simple,” Parsons says. “The executive made it clear they didn’t want a large IT department. This meant I went for an extremely simple approach, using single suppliers where we could. I relied on industry standards to make sure I didn’t slow the business down by limiting scalability or hampering the ability to deploy new functionality.”
Solution
A man on a mission, Parsons didn’t want to go through the exhaustive and expensive process of tendering for a solution. Instead, he did the research himself, highlighting what he wanted to achieve and investigating the various platforms that could deliver the required functionality.
“Even though my own experience was with Linux and Unix, I realised these platforms wouldn’t work because of the degree of in-house expertise I’d need to maintain and develop,” he says. “The slow deployment speeds of these systems compared to other solutions was also a drawback. Building up an IT department is difficult as it is without the added complexity of Linux and Unix.”
After extensive evaluation, Parsons decided to install a technology environment based on the Microsoft platform.
“As I hadn’t worked with Microsoft technology very much in the past, finding out how useful its products can be has been a real revelation,” he says. “I was comfortable that Microsoft’s strategy was aligned with Coffey’s and was geared towards companies like us. Microsoft is very strong on information management, collaboration, and solutions for geographically dispersed companies. These are all things that are very important to us.”
He adds, “The Microsoft environment is also easy to deploy and manage, making the lives of IT staff much easier.”
After assessing a number of implementation partners, Coffey selected Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Data#3. The company’s open communication channels, willingness to make experts available at the drop of a hat to assist with decision making, and excellent account management skills all contributed to the decision.
“My staff hadn’t come across the problems inherent in managing IT environments for large companies,” says Parsons.
“They were unfamiliar with issues like reducing support costs while increasing service delivery performance and introducing standards of nomenclature and documentation. Data#3 helped me quickly define some of these processes and standards to drive the deployment with my staff.”
“To run an organisation with 1,700 employees that’s growing so rapidly, Coffey needed a robust, stable, and reliable platform,” says Caroline Sweeney, Licensing Sales Specialist at Data#3.
“It wanted to reshape businesses processes such as e-mail and information-sharing. Microsoft could provide all this functionality without Coffey having to worry about fitting together solutions from different vendors,” she notes.
Coffey purchased an extensive range of Microsoft server products to form a comprehensive IT solution. It installed the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition communication and collaboration server, Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Systems Management Server 2003, Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, and SQL Server™ 2000 Standard Edition. Coffey also uses Terminal Services (part of Windows Server 2003) to provide remote access to users on the move.
Coffey purchased these from Data#3 under a three-year Enterprise Agreement that included Software Assurance.
“Software Assurance gives my staff access to expert advice and deployment assistance for Microsoft products,” says Parsons. “The Enterprise Agreement takes the day-to-day management of license management off my shoulders. It’s important to me that Coffey International, as an ethical organization, maintains its responsibilities to Microsoft. The Enterprise Agreement certainly gives me peace of mind in that regard.”
Parsons selected Microsoft in June 2005, and initial deployment began in November of the same year. Active Directory®directory service went live in November, Exchange Server2003 in December, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in January 2006. The implementation will be driven from Australia and affect Coffey’s systems across the world.
At the time of publication in April 2006, the rollout was still in progress, with 87 percent of staff on a standard platform and only remote sites still to be installed.
As well as replacing its existing environments with a standardized Microsoft platform, Coffey also changed its network provider. All companies were taken off their existing networks and migrated to Coffey’s newly opened data center at Global Switch in the inner-city suburb of Ultimo, Sydney.
“The new system allows Coffey to completely change the way it does business. Now, when it acquires new companies, it will be easy to migrate them onto the central platform,” says Sweeney.
Benefits
Moving to a Microsoft platform has made managing Coffey’s technology environment easier for IT staff and provided benefits for employees across the organization, regardless of their location.
KnowledgeSharing and Collaboration
A centralized, standardized technology platform across the organization has encouraged cooperation across different units.
“Coffey has put a lot of effort into getting people to understand that there is a world outside their own office doors,” says Parsons. “When we installed the Microsoft technology, there was massive growth in knowledgesharing and collaboration. Once you put in the infrastructure to make it easy for people to work together, they’ll take advantage of it.”
One of the most important collaboration tools is a centralized Exchange Server 2003 messaging system, which gives Coffey quality e-mail and calendar management. This makes it easy for staff to contact colleagues, share information, and collaborate on projects.
“We have many of the world’s leading experts in areas such as geo-technical and environmental engineering, and construction and project management,” says Parsons. “It would be such a waste if these people couldn’t work together. Collaboration always achieves better results for the client and everyone involved in a project. I’m thrilled to see our teams working together.”
Document Sharing
Data previously hidden from public view has been taken off users’ PCs and put on platforms where it is accessible by others outside that specific business unit. To assist this process, Coffey launched a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 intranet site, which gives users easy access to data.
“By centralizing company information, we have sped up knowledge sharing across the organization. It has also reduced the amount of data we need to store; rather than maintaining multiple copies, everyone can now access one. Data is also far better managed. We’re now sure everyone is looking at the same document, and that document is the most recent version.”
Standardization
Developing a standard approach to software and software management has allowed Coffey to develop centers of excellence for software utilization.
“Standardizing our software environment means we can develop standards our clients can rely on,” says Parsons. “They know that they can expect a common and very high standard of use from these applications.”
Increased Mobility
“Previously, as soon as an employee left the office to work offsite, they began to lose touch and become out of date,” says Parsons. “Now, the mobility of our taskforce is increasing week by week.”
Coffey’s centralized infrastructure allows people to stay in touch with live data. Staff can now work effectively from home, customer offices, or even mining sites in remote regions.
Ease of Management
Coffey has changed from an organization with a variety of IT platforms, a multitude of distributed businesses, and no central IT team or CIO to a well-oiled machine with a standardized technology environment that’s easy for staff to manage and maintain.
“We needed to keep it simple, and we did,” says Parsons. “Our IT team of just 10 people supports 1,700 employees in 47 offices around the world. That’s impressive.”
“Microsoft provided the solution we were looking for. I don’t have to keep track of technology developments—they do that for me. I don’t have to work out how to get various bits and pieces working together—they just do. Microsoft offers a holistic platform we can grow from. They keep it simple, and it works. What more could you ask for?”
Windows Server 2003
The Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family helps organizations do more with less. Now you can: Run your IT infrastructure more efficiently; Build better applications faster; Deliver the best infrastructure for enhancing user productivity. And you can do all this faster, more securely, and at lower cost.
For more information about Windows Server 2003, please visit: