As a leading provider of critical infrastructure in the UK and Ireland, Telent designs, delivers and supports solutions for companies in many different industries including transportation, telecommunications and the public sector.
Expanding beyond IT outsourcing
As a technology leader, Telent wanted a more flexible and cost-efficient infrastructure to deliver key enterprise resource planning applications and network services to customers. But to do so, the company needed to modernise its IT platform.
Telent tapped into DXC Technology’s expertise to quickly migrate IT resources to public clouds and for ongoing IT support — helping the Warwick, UK-based company increase operational agility and reduce costs.
“We needed a solution that was cost effective so we could deliver reduced cost of services to our business,” says Ian Price, head of IT Operations at Telent. “We were also looking for a consumption-based model that was both scalable and agile.”
“DXC understands our environment and the way our service model worked because DXC has managed our mission critical systems for nearly a decade. They had undertaken transformation programs with us previously, so that gave us a level of competence we were happy with.”
Ian Price Head of IT Operations, Telent
Telent has a longstanding working relationship with DXC, which provided IT outsourcing services through a DXC managed private cloud for many years. To meet the company’s transformation goals, Telent worked with DXC to move workloads to the public cloud, taking advantage of both Microsoft Azure and Oracle clouds.
DXC’s deep knowledge of Telent’s existing IT estate helped ensure a smooth transition and support a simplified and reliable IT environment.
“DXC understands our environment and the way our service model worked because DXC has managed our missioncritical systems for nearly a decade,” Price says. “They had undertaken transformation programs with us previously, so that gave us a level of competence we were happy with.”
6-month migration to the cloud
As the timeframe for completing the move to the cloud was just 6 months, DXC took an agile approach and conducted the migration in waves. DXC worked closely with Telent to identify workloads that could be optimised to achieve cost savings without impacting areas such as performance or security.
The migration included moving Telent’s Oracle ERP applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to optimise the Oracle estate to achieve elasticity, efficiency and resiliency. The Oracle cloud provides enterprise-grade performance, security and availability by modernising applications to consume Oracle platform-native services. All other applications were moved to Microsoft Azure. Because DXC maintains strong global partnerships with both Microsoft and Oracle, DXC was able to support both platforms.
The project was aided by DXC’s advanced automation platform that analyses and automates IT environments using real-time data collection and analysis to continuously monitor and improve performance.
Focus on reliability
Due to the technology-centric nature of Telent’s business, maintaining high reliability of its IT infrastructure and systems is essential. Factors such as cost, performance and reliability were taken into consideration to measure the best ways to deliver the performance and efficiency service levels that Telent needed. In doing so, DXC identified services that could be improved by moving resources such as networking, memory and storage to the cloud.
The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework served as a set of guiding tenets to improve the quality of workloads. With the Microsoft Azure cloud, Telent has access to reliability resources such as geo-redundant storage and Azure Site Recovery services, designed to keep applications running during planned or unplanned outages.
Where possible, DXC used Infrastructure as Code for the deployment. This was audited against Azure’s policies to ensure standards were being met. The process included ensuring that the proper naming strategies were being used, as well as enforcing standards related to virtual machine sizes and IP address assignments.
End-to-end cloud support
Microsoft Azure is providing Telent with increased flexibility and the economies of scale that come with moving to a public cloud. DXC provides daily operational support of Azure compute, storage and virtual network infrastructure, by monitoring and managing system software, infrastructure configurations and service consumption using proven processes. In addition, DXC’s financial and governance services help reduce uncontrolled consumption.
“We’ve initiated some application modernisation projects that are taking advantage of the features available in Azure that weren’t available to us in our previous environment,” Price says. “We’ll use the features that are now available in the public cloud to modernise and further secure our applications.”
Spinning up new customer-focused services is now much faster and easier for Telent. Some initiatives that used to take 2 weeks now take as little as 2 hours from concept to delivery, improving customer satisfaction.
Platform for the future
Telent is also benefiting from the as-a-service business model and consumption-based pricing — paying only for services used — and from rapid, low-risk execution to maximise return on investment. Among the key capabilities gained are the ability to offer new web apps customers, serverless computing operations, database as a service, DevOps life cycle management and dynamic resource allocation.
“We’ve initiated some application modernisation projects that are taking advantage of the features available in Azure. We’ll use the features that are now available in the public cloud to modernise and further secure our applications.”
Ian Price Head of IT Operations, Telent
Price says Telent appreciates DXC’s planning, tools and experience to meet deadlines and deliver services as promised.
“DXC has proven, structured processes for delivery and also understands our business goals,” Price says. “And on the back of that, DXC has the ongoing managed services and skills needed to take us on the journey and support us in future.”