JDA Software migrates 1,400 users to Office 365

Customer Profile

JDA Software is the leading provider of end-to-end, integrated retail, omnichannel, and supply chain planning and execution solutions. Serving more than 4,000 customers worldwide, JDA’s unique solutions empower their clients to reduce costs, increase profitability and improve collaboration. As a result, they can deliver on their customer promises every time.

Business Drivers

An established global leader in supply chain and logistics, JDA Software requires a rock-solid IT infrastructure. They must track and manage commodities as they move from raw materials in the manufacturing process all the way to the finished product on storefront shelves for instance. After going “All in on the Cloud,” JDA’s IT department moved all of its central applications off-site, into the cloud, and is now using a SAS model for all of its integrated supply chain management and logistics products.

The Challenge: On-Prem to OneDrive Migration On A Deadline

After moving its customer-facing IT applications into the cloud, JDA Software needed a way to migrate its global user base from on-premises network file shares to cloud-based storage.

“Our existing on-premises file storage architecture was becoming burdensome. We were doubling our amount of SAN storage every three years,” said Mark Fling, Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at JDA Software. “That gets to be very expensive, very quickly. With cloud storage, we can be much more flexible in terms of how we deliver IT services worldwide and we have the ability to scale up and down based on business requirements. It’s a win-win situation.”

After already implementing two cloud storage providers, JDA Software decided to consolidate its user base to one single platform. They planned on using Microsoft’s Office 365 with OneDrive. However, IT had a tight deadline of 60 days to move 1,400 users from its existing cloud storage services into the Microsoft Environment.

To complete the OneDrive migration, JDA chose a popular SharePoint and Office 365 migration tool to move their users and content. However, it was quickly discovered that the tool was inadequate.

“We found that there were several major failures in terms of throughput. There was a very tight deadline of migrating 700 gigabytes per week, and the tool simply could not deliver that,” Fling said. “We tried for several weeks, but it became apparent very quickly that we weren’t going to make our deadlines.”

After struggling with their initial migration tool, Fling said JDA asked their consultants at Statera to seek out a different, more effective product.

We were able to catch up to our deadline, and actually finish our migration a week ahead of schedule. I don’t know what DryvIQ does behind the scenes, but it certainly works.
Mark Fling, VP of Infrastructure & Operations

The Solution

“We discovered DryvIQ through Statera,” Fling said. “We did not go through a very long evaluation process. It became apparent right from the start that DryvIQ was the right tool for us. It had all of the features we wanted. We installed it and were up and running almost immediately.”

Fling said that DryvIQ delivered a 6-fold improvement on the speed of file transfers over their original migration tool. Moreover, the content came over intact with existing document versions, properties and user permissions attached.

“DryvIQ picked up the content and moved it over perfectly without so much as a scratch,” Fling said.

The Results

“DryvIQ was bulletproof. We never had one dropped connection and we never exceeded bandwidth limitations. It played by the rules and did so very efficiently. We were able to catch up to our deadline, and actually finish our migration a week ahead of schedule,” Fling said. “I don’t know what DryvIQ does behind the scenes, but it certainly works.”

With DryvIQ on the job, JDA was able to finally complete the OneDrive migration. This included 1,400 users with 6 terabytes of content to OneDrive in 30 days while also meeting its on-premises migration deadline.

Now that its user-base and on-premises file systems have been consolidated into Microsoft’s Office 365 and OneDrive, Fling said that JDA’s ability to collaborate has never been better. Workplace efficiency has improved as users no longer have to spend time copying and sharing documents from various platforms via email.

“The Office 365 suite makes it so much easier for us to collaborate and open documents in real-time. Today, our product team has a single repository of data that they use to develop software products, which was spread out over a variety of different platforms before. We are seeing improved time-to-market and better customer alignment. They can provide a much more focused product now.”

Enterprise-level service

Fling said overall, he was most impressed with DryvIQ’s user-friendliness and responsive technical support.

“DryvIQ is a true enterprise-class piece of software. It’s remarkably robust and stable,” Fling said. “It’s probably one of the most reliable pieces of software I ever got out of the box. I cannot understate that.”