Success Story: Enterprise Software Company

A global software company had completed several acquisitions in a single year and needed to demonstrate immediate brand integration to its customers as well as its public investors. The first key initiative was to bring all the legacy users under a single customer service umbrella. Both the financial and the customer communities at large expected this to happen in an expedited manner as a key indicator of integration success. Therefore, SDG was chartered with:

• Integrating the acquired customer service systems as quickly as possible
• Providing a seamless service experience using existing infrastructure
• Expediting the integrated brand alignment time to market

What seemed a straightforward initiative was seeded with the common challenges of integrating multiple lines of business. Each acquired company had its own user identities, security policies, directories, infrastructures, and supporting personnel. After initial analysis, SDG identified the project roadmap:

• Align the 5 disparate systems with unique application cross-dependencies
•  Integrate the 14, 000 internal employees and 300,000 external users into a common global customer service platform
• Aggregate 5 different identity stores across 5 distinct sets of infrastructure
• Recognize a single user may have multiple identities established across the 5 systems and rationalize to a common user identity recognized by all necessary applications
• Create a common set of policies and procedures for the infrastructure teams

SDG end solution was built on Radiant Logic Virtual Directory Server (VDS) and CA Single Sign-On. In an effort to buy time while the proper integration planning occurred, SDG established an interim environment that could operate in parallel using the power of Single Sign On (SSO) combined with the existing legacy support systems. VDS was used to create the concept of a unified user profile that drew its attributes from all 5 existing directories. This enabled a user to log in one time and access as many of the legacy support systems as needed. Once the interim environment was operational, SDG went forward with the long-term consolidation strategy that eventually combined the 5 service systems, processes, and personnel into a single, cohesive unit.