Lighting the way towards cloud transformation excellence
Overview
A leading global energy and chemicals company recognized the urgent need to modernize their IT infrastructure across three major geographical regions. Operating in one of the world's most demanding industrial sectors, the organization required seamless and reliable technology operations to support its critical business processes.
With operations across South Africa, Europe and North America, the company embarked on a digital transformation journey to unify systems, modernize infrastructure and streamline processes. Recognizing the opportunity to enhance efficiency and enable sustainable growth, leadership took a bold step toward building a more agile, connected and future-ready enterprise.
To execute this transformation, they partnered with us, to leverage our deep industry expertise and proven capabilities in global IT operations management.
The challenge
Identifying critical infrastructure and operational challenges
With operations spanning continents, our client found themselves at a crossroads — managing complex infrastructure demands while striving for operational harmony.
Operating across three continents, the client’s IT landscape had grown increasingly fragmented over time. Each region ran its own decentralized processes, powered by multiple ITSM tools that created silos and slowed down unified service delivery.
Critical applications continued to run on aging physical infrastructure, leading to recurring performance issues and an unstructured approach to inventory management.
Their infrastructure footprint was equally complex, multiple data centers across geographies, diverse monitoring tools and an environment spanning 2,811 Windows servers, 491 Linux servers and over 30,200 O365 mailboxes and 2500 on-prem. With 10,000+ tickets processed monthly and limited automation maturity, maintaining efficiency at scale was becoming increasingly difficult.
Faced with this growing complexity, the client needed a trusted partner who could drive a unified transformation across regions, simplifying operations, modernizing infrastructure and ensuring seamless business continuity.
The objective
Driving efficiency through modernization
With a vision to build a more agile, efficient and future-ready enterprise, our client set out to streamline and modernize their global IT operations. Their key goals included:
- Standardizing IT operations across all regions
- Modernizing legacy infrastructure to improve performance and reliability
- Enhancing automation maturity for faster, error-free service delivery
- Improving inventory accuracy through structured asset management
- Achieving measurable cost optimization and operational excellence
The solution
Unifying and transforming global operations
- Partnering with HCLTech, the client embarked on a comprehensive infrastructure transformation journey, one that would unify operations, modernize technology and lay the foundation for consistent service excellence across continents.
Global standardization
- Unified ITSM processes across all regions using ServiceNow, creating a single digital backbone for service delivery
- Established standardized ITIL-aligned processes to drive consistency and control
- Developed a structured CMDB, identifying and cataloging 40% of previously untracked assets
Infrastructure modernization
- Migrated critical applications from aging physical systems to a high-performance virtual environment
- Transformed legacy MS Exchange infrastructure into a redundant, high-availability system
- Consolidated four data centers into one optimized facility, reducing server footprint by 20%
- Implemented unified SCOM monitoring for complete infrastructure visibility and proactive management
Operational Excellence
- Achieved 50% automation maturity through intelligent automation tools, enhancing speed and accuracy
- Established dedicated regional SMEs to ensure on-ground expertise and operational resilience
The Impact
Delivering measurable outcomes and strategic value
The transformation delivered exceptional and measurable outcomes:
Infrastructure excellence:
- Transformed 80% of infrastructure to virtualized VMware environment
- Consolidated to Nutanix hyper-converged environment, achieving 15% cost optimization
- Migrated SAP to Azure cloud with 30% cost savings
- Achieved 20% cloud footprint with 40% target by year-end
Operational performance:
- Reduced P1 and P2 incidents from 60 to 3 per month
- Achieved 60% proactive incident resolution, driving 98% end-user satisfaction
- Maintained 100% patch compliance
- Established 100% CMDB accuracy globally
Strategic value:
- Delivered $4.1 million USD in cost optimization
- Partnership extended for 5 years in 2020 with expanded scope including Network, Voice and Security
- Maintained operations throughout the pandemic with no major outages
Conclusion
The global energy leader successfully transformed from fragmented, multi-regional IT operations to a unified, modernized technology powerhouse. Their strategic vision and commitment to digital transformation delivered substantial cost savings and operational improvements, positioning them for continued growth in the competitive energy sector.
