A Mergers & Acquisitions Case Study – Microsoft Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration Services
Ribbon Communications is a global technology company with more than two decades of leadership in real-time communications. Built on world-class technology and intellectual property, Ribbon delivers secure, embedded and engaging real-time communications for today’s world. The company transforms fixed, mobile and enterprise networks from legacy environments to secure IP and cloud-based architectures. With locations in 27 countries around the globe, Ribbon’s innovative, market-leading portfolio empowers service providers and enterprises with rapid service creation using fully virtualized environments and network infrastructure, along with a new level of security for real-time communications. Below are the challenges and solutions Enclyne and Ribbon faced during the Tenant to Tenant Migration to Microsoft 365.
Challenge:
Ribbon, formerly known as Sonus Networks, acquired GenBand, a global communications leader in IP services with over 1600 active employees around the globe, 2500 mailboxes, hundreds of outside contractors, and thousands of groups. Shortly after the acquisition, Sonus rebranded to Ribbon Communications as part of their new marketing strategy, and therefore required new email and Skype addresses for all employees. All migrations involving the merging Office 365 Tenant to Tenant migration or Office 365 to Office 365 migration and rebranding come with significant challenges, but migrating GenBand’s Hybrid Exchange environment into Sonus’ Hybrid Exchange/Lync environment added a great deal of complexity, especially considering their secondary goals of 24-hour uptime and to lay the groundwork for long-term AD migration. Delivering a solution under deadline that passed muster with all stakeholders and minimized end-user impact proved to be a technical and logistical gauntlet.
Before:
During:
Tenant to Tenant Solution:
Ribbon and Enclyne reviewed a number of options for the migration approach, technology support, and processes. After in-depth analysis of both Hybrid environments, thorough assessment of departmental and technological dependencies, and a long whiteboarding session, a migration approach was defined. Through a staged migration strategy lasting several months, Enclyne and Ribbon communications together tackle both rebranding, hybrid tenant to tenant messaging migration, and the first steps of AD migration utilizing Exchange email policies, Microsoft Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT), custom PowerShell scripting, BitTitan MigWiz, third-party continuity services, and good old-fashioned Project Management. Departments were alerted and subsequently migrated via a proprietary multi-step batch migration process designed and executed by Enclyne and coordinated in direct collaboration with Ribbon stakeholders. With this approach, departments were migrated strategically and could be supported accordingly, and users themselves had zero to virtually zero service downtime.
More technical guidance on Tenant to Tenant migrations can be found here.
After:
Did the Tenant to Tenant Project Require Hero’s or Heroic Efforts?
We believe everyone on our team is a hero and heroic efforts are the result. This project provided an opportunity for our consultants to apply experience from numerous projects to craft the appropriate solution. The result was a successful project, which like all projects had a few surprises, but met the needs of Ribbon to rapidly assimilate GenBand into their company.
About Enclyne:
Enclyne is a cloud services provider. The Austin, Texas based company was founded 9 years ago to help our customers enjoy the benefits of cloud computing. Enclyne partnered with Microsoft and other leading cloud service providers whose products and services we sell and deliver to our customers. After migrating hundreds of companies to Microsoft cloud offerings Office 365 and Azure, we are a leader in complex migrations of messaging services, documents, networks and servers to the cloud.
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS: With our team’s assistance you will accelerate the integration of your information technology assets. Enclyne specializes in merging messaging systems, document management and server and networks. Use our experience to ensure your merger’s success.
Ribbon Communications selected Enclyne based on our company’s wealth of experience in messaging migrations, specifically Exchange Hybrid and Microsoft Office 365 Tenant to Tenant migrations. Enclyne has experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, rebranding, identity management via AD Connect, ADFS and third-party Single Sign-on services, as well as tools for on-premises AD and data migrations.