At A Glance
Global engineering firm unifies operations with a single cloud office
Customer Overview:
Oil & Engineering Group had expanded rapidly, but its computing systems hadn’t kept up. This has caused inefficiencies, workflow bottlenecks, and difficulties in system management. Seeing the cloud as both the solution to its issues and the way to the future, the company embarked on the ambitious task of making all operations virtual.
The result? Seamless collaboration globally, vastly simplified management, and a productivity and efficiency leap that’s enabled easier expansion.
Oil & Engineering Group is always looking for better ways to do things. So when the company, which operates globally in the oil and gas sector, needed to unify its geographically separate operations and streamline communication and collaboration, the cloud was the obvious solution.
Entering the Virtual Age:
“In this virtual age, we knew that the benefits were there,” says David Battersby, Group Head of IT. Attempts to create an in-house solution failed because of poor bandwidth and latency in some countries, and cloud hosting options all came with “too much extra baggage,” he explains. The company had recently rolled out Office 365, so “it made total sense to go with Microsoft. All the licensing and headache was taken away from us.”
In 2014, the company moved to Azure. Migrating a global organization to the cloud was very ambitious, and every step involved rewriting and redesigning. Partner GetMax was instrumental in rolling out the Microsoft side of the services. “Everything we are doing is new,” explains Battersby, “so it has been not just a learning curve, but a boundary exercise.”
The Way of the Future:
In late 2017, after leveraging the high-performance computing (HPC) services of Azure, the company reached several breakthroughs. The HPC automatically expands to accommodate the number of users and their needs, so now multiple users can be connected to a high-performance application, like CAD, video, or 3D rendering. This had previously caused a workflow bottleneck, with only one user able to work on a drawing at a time.
The greatest benefit is the integration of the company’s global operations, with all users able to connect to the virtual desktop from anywhere in the world, making communication and collaboration seamless while freeing employees to work from anywhere. For a company that works 24/7 across time zones, the productivity and efficiency increases are significant, with time and cost savings to match.
“Now we can open a new office anywhere in the world in days, not months, and one person can manage the entire infrastructure from anywhere,” says Battersby, who sees Harris Pye as breaking new ground. “Everybody will come to understand in the future what significance this event has had in the world of technology and in the world of business and in the world of productivity”