The digital divide that was arising between 90 global markets of Wunderman Thompson due to the presence of a wide range of tools and platforms made it realize that it was time to bring about a few changes in the IT infrastructure for the smooth functioning of its operations.
The company has on its roll more than 20,000 employees and they operate from across more than 200 offices worldwide. Up to December 2019, the individual markets were making use of their tools and platforms so that they could store and manage their data effectively.
Why was the migration needed?
While they were operating across multiple tenants, it was posing to be a challenge to keep together different offices from across multiple locations worldwide since the nature of the business was unified.
Moreover, another problem that they were facing was that of collaborating effectively amongst each other. So, the digital global company realized that removing these hurdles was the need of the hour, even if that meant communicating through video conferences and virtual events daily.
WPP, the parent advertising group wanted to merge all users into a lone tenant that would operate within the purview of the WPP Cloud by tapping into the potentialities of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
So, although, it was understood that an overall overhaul was the need of the hour and is perhaps the only practical solution that could be given shape but bringing about a change of this proportion was filled with apprehensions.
Availing services of Nero Blanco
So, here comes Nero Blanco, to rescue Wunderman Thompson that boasts of more than 50 years of experience in handling migration projects on a larger scale. So, it was decided that Nero Blanco would be migrating the workloads to Office 365.
According to Steve Bumba, who is the director, portfolio and solutions at Wunderman Thompson, the large scale of the project and the presence of multiple players within the organization presented with multifaceted challenges. However, he also stated that the need for unification was felt by all.
While Steve Bumba had to say the above, representative of Nero Blanco stated that since they are a “solution team”, they strive to attain their goals in the best possible efficient and logical manner. Most importantly, the very approach gelled well with Nero Blanco.
The representative also said that most of the IT firms had a very strict and fixed approach and tried to impose their systems instead of rising to the situation to solve the problem of the client. However, since Nero Blanco is flexible in the way it operates, it is best to collaborate with Wunderman Thompson.
Taking the migration process ahead
At the time when the migration kicked off, the project lead also the infrastructure architect Twan van Beers, a combination of “3 software-as-a-service solutions”, applying a transparent, creative, and collaborative approach, Nero Blanco made sure that it delivers the migration process effectively and within time.
The company went ahead with a configuration of BitTitan’s Migration Wiz, conducted extensive planning, and discovery procedures, aside from the much-needed, pre-migration tasks that were crucial. The team also used “Teams migration farm solutions”, and SharePoint.
An amazing procedural migration
Nero Blanco managed to migrate the following-
- 11,720 OneDrive accounts
- 8,100 Teams channels that comprised 50 terabytes of data, which was accessed by the whole user community or population.
- 165 SharePoint sites
- 14,750 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange
Nature of migration
Speaking about the migration process, Steve Bumba expressed that the migration was unique that unveiled several “undocumented limitations” about the software, which even the individual software vendors did not know. He also said that the process “stretched” the scripting capacity of Nero Blanco but both parties worked in tandem and as a team to address the issues as and when they appeared during the migration process.
About Nero Blanco
The company was set up in 2012, the company will introduce you to ways that you may not have thought about when it comes to working out an IT-related solution. So, they rightly say, that they exist so that they can “shake up” the IT industry to manifest before you better solutions that will work in tandem with the client’s “built-in capabilities”.
About Wunderman Thompson
A New-York based marketing communications firm that operates globally, Wunderman Thompson was set up in the year 2018 after merging J.Walter Thompson and Wunderman that was planned by the parent company WPP Group. Their areas of expertise include Apps, Commerce, B2B, CRM, Consulting, Communications, Health, Data, CX, Production, Intelligence, and Technology. So, Wunderman Thompson is a growth partner, an agency, a consultant, and more.
