Challenges: Ensuring seamless collaboration across the globe
When global professional services company GHD merged with North American engineering consultancy Conestoga-Rovers and Associates (CRA), it added more than 3,000 employees in 100 offices, including 50 small sites.
They needed a simple, cost-effective solution to enable the rapid deployment of those new sites onto the company’s network. Riverbed SteelConnect has helped GHD achieve this, fueling stronger collaboration amongst its project teams spread across the globe, business agility and cost savings of an anticipated USD 1 million a year.
GHD, a leader in engineering, architecture, environmental and construction services, has a complex IT landscape which spans more than 10 countries, 8,500 employees, leverages 3,000 business and technical applications, and includes GHD’s own private cloud.
IT and the use of emerging technology are foundational to how GHD delivers successfully to its clients. In addition to leveraging more than 3,000 business and technical applications – many of which are data and bandwidth intensive design tools – GHD hosts its own cloud to support ongoing client needs. It is an effective but complex environment that powers the collaboration of global project teams as well as client engagement.
In 2014, GHD merged with Canadian engineering consultancy Conestoga-Rovers & Associates (CRA), inheriting 3,000 new employees. Of the new offices they had to integrate into the wider GHD business, 50 were small and remote sites of less than 10 employees each. Larger offices were brought on to the GHD network through more traditional approaches – a process that would take a full year to complete – but these smaller offices, which are typically set up to be close to a client, had to be brought on more quickly. GHD was looking for a cost-effective solution to provision these sites, and it needed to be both easy to deploy and to maintain given the limited amount of IT resources at the locations.
“To me, ensuring that all our people – regardless of location – can do their jobs every day and have the tools they need to be successful is absolutely critical,” says Elizabeth Harper, CIO, GHD.
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