NRG Energy, Inc. is an American energy company serving 6 million retail customers in 24 US states and eight provinces in Canada. NRG provides natural gas generation, coal generation, oil generation, nuclear generation, wind generation, utility scale generation, and distributed solar generation. NRG generates more than 23,000 MW of power from over 40 power plants.
Business Challenge NRG Energy has acquired eleven other energy companies, both generation and retail, that include Reliant Energy, XOOM Energy, Green Mountain Energy, Stream Energy, Discount Power and Cirro Energy. They’ve grown to over 6500 employees, many of whom work in offices and field locations. Like other companies growing through acquisition, system and application integration is critical to achieving business value.
Solution For over a decade, XMS Solutions has worked with NRG’s Enterprise Architecture team to integrate, migrate, support and upgrade of dozens of directory and collaboration systems and applications. XMS developed a continuous, scalable process for prioritizing application migration targets, identifying required resources and level of effort, and a deployment methodology minimizing impact on users and the business.
Results Driven by consistent M&A activity, NRG teams are required to integrate quickly while maintaining the rigid compliance and security requirements of the energy industry. Partnering with XMS Solutions, NRG reaches the IT target state of the combined company much faster, reducing transition cost and risk by reducing the dependency on the seller’s IT landscape. Users have achieved productivity targets faster, while compliance and security requirements remain fulfilled within required timelines.
For companies growing through acquisition, realizing the value of a deal depends on how well they integrate the acquired assets into their existing operations. At Matthews International, disparate systems limited use of common features and created a potential compliance nightmare.
Business Challenge After a period of acquisition-led growth, Matthews International found itself with 20 corporate subsidiaries, over 13,000 users leveraging 18 different environments. Users became vocal about productivity challenges. IT departments across the company experienced high call volumes and low customer satisfaction ratings. The impact of a “status quo” approach for collaboration had become a serious impediment for employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Costs for system maintenance were at an all-time high with no signs of reduction ahead. Security concerns were a daily reality.
Solution XMS Solutions started with a series of workshops with Matthews International’s IT teams and business leaders in each company, developing use cases stretching from company to company, across countries, partners and suppliers. Requirements and processes were documented, evaluated and challenged. Current system cost and maintenance drivers were also calculated and measured against a matrix of benefit and risk factors. Cultural aspects of keeping systems on-premise vs. moving to the cloud were also discussed. Access and security templates and policies were created, leveraging flexibility and enforceability acceptable to business units worldwide. Common policies for e-discovery reduced risk.
Results A migration plan focused on Microsoft technologies was reviewed and accepted by the business. XMS Solutions deployed a central communication platform to keep Matthews International’s user base informed about the migration, serving as a hub for training schedules and documentation. Upon completion of migration and training, surveys were taken to evaluate the impact on user productivity and overall satisfaction with the process and new tools. Matthews International users registered levels of satisfaction never before seen at the company.
RTI maintains offices across four continents and supports workers in more than 100 countries. Legacy infrastructure and applications represented a challenge to the new realities of the mobile workforce.
Business Challenge Research Triangle Institute’s (RTI) team of over 6,000 tackles hundreds of projects in over 75 countries each year. Since 1958, RTI has worked to address complex social and scientific challenges on behalf of governments, businesses, foundations, universities, and other clients and partners. RTI sought to modernize legacy infrastructure, applications and security policies, moving to the Microsoft cloud for improved workforce productivity and lower costs.
Solution XMS Solutions documented the use cases, infrastructure and support footprint for RTI’s current applications and systems. From there, a plan for consolidating and securing on premise infrastructure was developed, followed by a cloud migration plan that minimized user and business disruption. Finally, a future-facing roadmap was developed with RTI’s Enterprise Architecture team to integrate additional Microsoft capabilities over time.
Results Users found better performance from applications and development teams delivered new features faster. Through self-service provisioning, IT put the required resources in place in hours, not weeks. When demand spikes or field teams need more powerful compute resources, IT alters their resources instantly on demand. Security management and support was also simplified through automated capabilities within the Azure stack. RTI improved workforce productivity, reduced siloes and integrated organizations in the cloud, enabling employees to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere.
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