A maritime services company charts a new course with a digital transformation initiative

Bridging the gap between legacy systems and the latest innovations

Over the past few years, the larger competitive environment in Professional Services has changed radically. Customers and business partners now expect instantaneous service, higher levels of innovation, and 24/7 availability of systems and applications. While social, local, and mobile solutions enable higher levels of agility, responsiveness, and customer experience, realizing these promised benefits can often be difficult – particularly for established companies with higher levels of legacy and technical debt.

Integrating these new technologies with the existing legacy infrastructure can often end up creating more problems than it solves – and this is exactly the challenge that one of the world’s leading providers of professional services in the maritime and shipping sector was facing.

Increased efficiency, agility, flexibility, and drastically improved time to market

In expanding on an already lengthy partnership, the client approached Capgemini to support its digital transformation program and satisfy the substantial innovation demands logged by the organization’s IT team. The partners agreed upon the delivery of increased efficiency, agility, flexibility, and improved time to market as the primary objectives of the project. So, Capgemini’s delivery team put together a plan with ADMnext to deliver a full stack of disruptive, business insightful, transformation, and adaptive ADM services that would be underpinned by a host of organizational assets and enablers.

Firstly, Capgemini installed an Azure-based digital platform, which necessitated the implementation of a fresh operational model built around teams using Agile and DevOps practices in their work. Supported by these new ways of working, this digital platform enabled the organization’s internal development teams and other vendors to develop digital applications, and vastly improve customer experiences and time to market for several services.

With this digital platform operational, Capgemini then began to modernize specified elements of the business’ application portfolio. As part of ADMnext’s philosophy of insights-driven transformation, Capgemini began by executing an application portfolio assessment exercise. Based on this evaluation, the team then proposed an initial batch of applications re-factoring and re-development. As this transformation program unfolded, Capgemini continued to provide core application management support for over 75 legacy applications while also working on new applications being developed on the digital platform.

Another critical component of Capgemini’s overall transformational program for the organization was infrastructure transformation. The client wanted to move all of its applications to the public cloud and Capgemini helped it do so in a phased manner. During the first phase, Capgemini undertook the migration of 200 servers from the onsite data center to the Azure Cloud, resulting in immediate cost reductions and agility benefits.

Over the next few years, the remaining applications will be re-developed on the cloud-based digital platform, replaced by strategic SaaS platforms, or phased out over time. Overall, the actions taken by Capgemini have led to the following benefits:

• A quicker automated release process with the implementation of a digital platform
• Seven new applications already deployed and four more in-progress applications
• Cost reductions, improved agility, and increased alignment with a Cloud-First strategy, the closure of the onsite data center, and the migration of 200 servers to the Azure Cloud
• Faster time to market with the implementation of Agile and DevOps processes for teams working on new digital applications.

The way forward with ADMnext

Along with this ongoing application and infrastructure transformation, the business is also looking to transform from an applications-oriented company into a more product-focused entity. As a result, Capgemini will look into taking a completely different approach in terms of the client’s application portfolio, infrastructure, organizational structure, processes, tools, and responsiveness to the marketplace.

Capgemini will continue to contribute to this unfolding roadmap of transformation in order to help create a much more agile, technologically innovative organization that works according to a schedule of planned releases rather than the ad-hoc releases in place today.