Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer standardizes on .NET to cut costs by fostering development team collaboration and consolidating legacy applications

OverviewCountry or Region: Europe

Industry: Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer

Customer ProfileThe healthcare division of a Fortune 500 global electronics manufacturer has developed a Microsoft Competency Group and is part of a “One IT” initiative to standardize processes, the platform, and tools.

Business SituationThe healthcare division was challenged by a lack of integration of Java-based tools with the Microsoft infrastructure. The company overall was challenged in leveraging resources and development assets across lines of business, divisions, and teams.

SolutionCreated a global shared service for development by standardizing on the Microsoft .NET platform and integrating with Microsoft communication, messaging, collaboration, and data architecture.

Benefits Cost savings through “top-down”

platform standardization Leverage vendor support for strategy

and execution Integration with other Microsoft

infrastructure and applications Consolidation of applications Access to and availability of skilled

resources

“For the company as a whole, we have gone from 30% development on Java to 15% development on Java and shrinking. The .NET platform is dramatically improving collaboration and creating leverage leading to massive application consolidation.”

Development Lead, Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer

A Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer embarked on a strategic

initiative to standardize and consolidate their companywide

development efforts into a global shared service—“One IT.”

This strategy involved standardization on the Microsoft .NET

development platform and a migration of the portion of the

development portfolio on Java to .NET, resulting in a cut from 30%

Java share of the development portfolio to only 15% and shrinking as

the Java applications are retired and as new .NET applications are

rolled out to production.

The benefits of the migration include significant cost savings from

leveraging code and skills among and across development teams;

application consolidation; better integration with Microsoft

infrastructure for communication, messaging, collaboration, and

databases; and, finally, access to more resources skilled in .NET.

Microsoft® .NETCustomer Migration Case Study

SituationA Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with a long history in many facets of the electronics business now has three major divisions including lighting, consumer products, and healthcare.

With over 100,000 employees around the world, the overall development team numbered in the high hundreds but was highly distributed across divisions, business lines, groups, and functions. Often developing on different platforms and focused on their own specific projects, the development teams frequently operated in a siloed and disjointed fashion.

The electronics manufacturer had a very large installed base of SAP and historically had done a significant amount of custom development on Java, namely business intelligence and reporting on top of the SAP applications. According to the development lead, “One of the things that SAP allowed you to do was to connect to it using a bunch of Java-based tools. The only problem with that is that the tools, although they have progressed, weren’t really that good. They were not giving the business the kind of information that it needed.”

Also, Java as a delivery platform for web-based applications was lacking from a technical, management, and integration perspective. “The big key why we are making plans to get away from Java was due to the lack of integration,” shared the development lead.

In addition to being vested in SAP, the company also had made a significant commitment to Microsoft including communication, messaging, collaboration, and database infrastructure. Integration with these core systems was an important

factor in creating a better environment for collaboration among developer teams.

From an organizational perspective, the company hatched a new business strategy to create “One IT,” which promised to standardize technology, foster collaboration among development teams, and consolidate the thousands of applications written on a variety of platforms companywide. This huge development portfolio of applications was plagued by common feature duplication as well as overlapping functionality in many cases.

According to the development lead, “The goal of this company is to have one IT, not an IT group for healthcare, an IT group for lighting, and another for personal consumer electronics. So the goal was to converge to just one platform and one team.”

SolutionThe top-down, “One IT” initiative, started toward the end of 2007, was driven by executives to better leverage skills and resources across divisions, business lines, and groups of the existing as well as newly acquired companies. Interestingly, several of the smaller companies the electronics manufacturer acquired were developing on Java, which hampered organizational integration.

The goal of the company is to have a single IT infrastructure and development team that spans all of the organizations—essentially a shared service organizational model. The leading driver is lowering cost by having a common platform not just for development, but also for better collaboration among teams and better integration of key business systems.

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“One of the things that SAP allowed you to do was to connect to it using a bunch of Java-based tools. The only problem with that is that the tools, although they have progressed, weren’t really that good. They were not giving the business the kind of information that it needed.“

Development Lead

Microsoft Competency Group

Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer

“The main driver to go into Microsoft solutions .”

An initial and important step on the path to standardized development was the rollout of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, which provides centralized source code control and work item creation, assignment, tracking, and reporting. Having cross-functional teams—including analysts, developers, testers, and IT management—on a single application lifecycle management (ALM) system was integral to the standardization process.

Prior to the migration, the company had about 65% of its overall development portfolio on Microsoft .NET, 30% of it on Java and 5% on other platforms. Due to the top-down edict, and the organization of Microsoft competency groups, the use of Java has dropped significantly in the three years of the initiative.

“Now that we are One IT, we are one converged platform, our use of Java is down to 15% and shrinking,” shared the lead developer.

The migration was extensive to the point that all new applications had to be developed on the .NET platform unless there was an exceptional business requirement to develop on another platform. That said, rather than rewrite the existing Java applications, we chose to leave the Java applications in place till those applications reached their end of life. He commented further, “We made a business decision to leave the Java stuff there because we found that there was such a problem finding the person that was actually knowledgeable enough to understand the Java code.”

From a vendor support perspective, the company noted that Microsoft and its partners did a great job of demonstrating the overall enterprise offering and strategy

for standardization. They did not feel like the same support was out there in the market in the context of Java.

Postmigration, the new applications developed on .NET are now helping unite the development teams through the common use of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Microsoft SharePoint technology, Microsoft SQL Server data management software, the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client, and Microsoft Office Communicator.

BenefitsIn the span of roughly three years, the team went from 65% .NET to 80% .NET, which is pretty remarkable considering that the companywide portfolio of applications numbers in the tens of thousands. The increase in .NET portfolio share is expected to continue to increase in step with the rollout of newly written .NET applications.

A Single, Centralized ALM Platform

A foundational benefit achieved early in the migration process was the standardization of development teams on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server for application lifecycle management (ALM). This has enabled increased collaboration among business analysts, developers, testers, and IT managers.

According to the lead developer, “Team Foundation Server drives everything that’s done, from source control, to creating tasks and work items, to assignment and completion. Standardizing our teams on Team Foundation Server allows us to be more agile, increasing visibility and transparency throughout the application lifecycle and effectively driving out risk in our development projects.”

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“Now that we are One IT, we are one converged platform, our use of Java is down to 15% and shrinking.“

Development Lead

Microsoft Competency Group

Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer

Cost Savings

At the highest levels of the organization, cutting costs was a primary driver for, and benefit of, the migration from Java to .NET. Cost savings were achieved by the consolidation of redundant applications and application functionality, better leverage of code and skills across major portions of the company, and finally from having a more available and affordable skill base versed in .NET.

Access to Skilled Development Resources

For the healthcare division of the company based in Atlanta, finding local resources skilled in Java to support and maintain the Java-based applications was difficult and costly. Standardizing on .NET has helped ensure resources are readily available and affordable for staff augmentation.

According to the lead developer, “Atlanta is a major city, and because Microsoft has a significant presence in the talent market, finding people that could actually write some of the things that needed to be written, writing code especially, there were tons of resources available and there were just a few of the Java guys.”

Vendor Support

Selecting the right vendor that could assist with not just the technology and tools, but also with strategy and implementation, was a great benefit throughout the migration process. The electronics manufacturer would have been hard-pressed to embark on the “One IT” journey without the help of Microsoft and its partners. “Microsoft is a major business partner for us, providing us

with an enterprise vision and a platform to get us there,” noted the lead developer. “I don’t know of any vendor in the Java space that has that kind of reach.”

Richer Integration with Other Applications

A key benefit realized was not just more extensive integration with the variety of Microsoft infrastructure in place but also the richness of the applications the manufacturer was able to build and roll out for customers. The lead developer shared an example of this richness in describing a web application that provided customers a self-service view into the medical equipment inventory.

“The service aspect is an important area for the healthcare group. All the equipment that our company sells has serial numbers and model numbers and detailed technical information stored in SAP. With our new .NET applications and SharePoint, our customers can pull up a webpage and actually look at each device and see if it's working—the percentage of the downtime and that sort of thing. It gives you kind of a statistical information base on each product. So we were able to provide customers with a very responsive application that also has some rich user interface pieces to it”, says the Development Lead.

Consolidation of Applications

With the standardization and migration to .NET under way, the company has been able to reduce the overlapping and duplicated functionality by building new applications on .NET that provide the

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“This is a monumental shift for us and is saving us an enormous amount of money. It's also going to save us resources because we can actually talk to each other now, on one platform.“

Development Lead

Microsoft Competency Group

Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer

functionality of what several applications did previously.

According to the lead developer, “Since the migration, the number of applications has fallen on the order of thousands. Instead of having three applications do a single thing, maybe we just have one.”

Summing up the migration to .NET, the lead developer said, “This is a monumental shift for us and is saving us an enormous amount of money. It’s also going to save us resources because we can actually talk to each other now, on one platform.”

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Visual Studio and .NETMicrosoft Visual Studio is a powerful IDE for developing .NET Framework applications that ensures quality code throughout the entire application lifecycle, from design to deployment.

The Microsoft .NET Framework enables developers to use the same set of skills to rapidly build quality applications for Windows, SharePoint, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, and beyond.

For more information about Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, go to:

www.microsoft.com/visualstudio

www.microsoft.com/net

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Document published March 2011