Box Adoption Yields Security, Storage, and Collaboration Gains

Transcription

1 Buyer Case Study Box Adoption Yields Security, Storage, and Collaboration Gains Maureen Fleming Chandana Gopal IDC OPINION This case study describes the adoption of Box by Avago Technologies, a large semiconductor manufacturer based in San Jose, California. Within two years of Box adoption, 80% of Avago's 10,000 employees worldwide regularly use the cloud file sync and share service, and the company has also integrated Box into its financial and partner operations. Highlights of this case study include: Two years ago, Avago began looking for a PC backup solution and a file sync and share solution. Avago initially viewed them as separate systems with separate needs. The company also needed to replace the file management system used in product life-cycle management. The evaluation team realized they could use file sync and share to meet their requirements. The selection of a cloud-based solution also aligned with the company's cloud-first strategy. Following an evaluation, Box was selected because of its enterprise orientation, security, auditing, and tracking features. Avago rolled out Box to its then 3,600 employees and migrated 18 million files from its PLM file system. It also eliminated all of its Windows-based file servers. The rollout took six months from evaluation to full deployment, including user training and migration. When Avago closed its LSI, all 6,000 LSI accounts were migrated to Box and went live on the day the acquisition closed. Avago realized both soft and hard benefits through the Box adoption. Avago grows through acquisitions, and the ability to use Box for communications and collaboration improves speed to business as usual for all employees. Hard benefits include more than $500,000 in annual direct operational costs savings, with millions of dollars of cost avoidance estimated from reduction in future capital and operational expenses. Avago's high adoption rates required support from the top executives. They also required buyin from business. That buy-in required internal marketing and training programs to help users learn how to use Box and become comfortable with the service. The Avago team found that there's a cutover point where just enough users are trained to create viral adoption as they share files and invite others to collaborate. Many organizations face the same issues that Avago has successfully dealt with over the past few years with its adoption of Box. Multisite IT environments that span country and regional boundaries, lack of uniformity in collaboration and backup functions, rapidly growing storage and archiving requirements, and the increased need for business agility are all symptoms of the need for an enterprise to closely examine file sync and share as a viable and valuable solution to one or more of these use cases. July 2014, IDC #250001

2 IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY This IDC Buyer Case Study describes the adoption of Box by a large global semiconductor manufacturer. In this study, we describe the challenges that the organization faced leading to the adoption, how the organization determined that a sync and share service was the best solution, why the organization chose Box, the implementation and evolution of use cases, and the lessons learned. SITUATION OVERVIEW Enterprise file sync and share cloud services are growing virally because they align well with changes in how consumers socialize and collaborate digitally. Consumer adoption led to business adoption as consumers at work recognized the alignment of sync and share with their changing work patterns. Knowledge workers tend to work anywhere across time zones. They work dynamically, with virtual teams rapidly assembled based on skills and availability and disassembled when projects are completed or problems solved. Performing work has shifted from a centralized effort by employees to a structure that includes contractors, customers, business service providers, and partners. With that comes a greater dependency on the Internet and a need to make it easy to share and collaborate within trusted virtual teams. Avago recognized these changes and recognized that its existing and planned IT investments didn't really match how people work together. The company also viewed cloud sync and share services as a way to displace expensive infrastructure, lowering the overall cost of IT operations and IT spending. Two years following the adoption of Box, 80% of Avago's 10,000 employees regularly use Box, and the company has also integrated the service into its financial and partner operations. This case study outlines the journey Avago went through recognizing the need for cloud file sync and share services as well as the identification of Box as its choice and early adoption, and rollout. Organization Overview With 10,000 employees dispersed across the United States, Europe, and Asia, Avago Technologies (Nasdaq: AVGO) is a publicly traded semiconductor manufacturing company based in San Jose. It designs and develops and is a global supplier of a wide range of analog semiconductor devices primarily for the wireless communications, wired infrastructure, and industrial markets. Avago components are embedded in smartphones, data networking and telecommunications equipment, enterprise storage and servers, factory automation, and industrial equipment. Once a part of the HP development group, Avago was formed in 2005 from the $2.66 billion acquisition of Agilent Semiconductor Products Group by KKR and Silver Lake Partners IDC #

3 Avago went public in August 2009 and has grown both organically and through multiple acquisitions. The most recent acquisitions were the $6.6 billion acquisition of LSI Corp. in May 2014 and the $400 million acquisition of CyOptics in June For this case study, we interviewed Stanley Toh, IT director, Enterprise End User Services, Avago. Purchasing Triggers and Selection Journey Two years ago, Avago was looking for a PC backup solution and a file sync and share solution. Avago initially viewed them as separate systems with separate needs. Avago concerned about the constant threat of data loss and the potential impact on productivity began investigating a cost-effective way to back up employee PCs. The on-premise solution Avago evaluated required the ability for all users in 32 locations across 15 countries on three continents to connect, which requires infrastructure in multiple regions. This solution would be both complex and expensive. Meanwhile, the vendor of a file management system used for product life-cycle management told Avago that the software was no longer a strategic product and would not be upgraded. While the system would continue to be supported as is, users complained that it was difficult to use; there were also performance issues, there was no mobile device enablement, and there were no security, discovery, or collaboration features. Collaboration across regions was slow with latency and network bandwidth because the production server was in one central location. Avago was maintaining multiple file servers in multiple locations. Without local staff on all sites, upgrades and backups were time consuming and costly. With increasing usage and accumulating file storage, costs were also rising, resulting in an embedded cost acceleration hardware and management of storage-related servers. License, maintenance, and management costs were in hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, Avago began to look for a cloud solution that combined the two functions PC backup and a collaborative file sharing solution. Avago evaluated Box, Dropbox, and both the on-premise and the cloud versions of Microsoft SharePoint. Avago was committed to an outsourcing model and adopting cloud technologies. Avago used Gmail and considered itself a Google shop. The use of SharePoint required the adoption of Exchange. Between the culture clash and cost, SharePoint was eliminated. Box emerged as the choice because of its enterprise orientation, security, auditing, and tracking features. Results: End-User Adoption Avago rolled out Box to all 3,600 employees and migrated 18 million files from its legacy file systems, eliminating all Windows-based file servers. The rollout took six months from evaluation to full deployment, including user training and data migration IDC #

4 The users did much of the implementation, Toh said. "It's very easy. We have the instructional guides for them, and Box also has videos. We also do a training class." Box is part of Avago's single sign-on environment and is all Web based. "We give them information and uplinks and they install it themselves." Despite the ease of installation, internal adoption was slower than the team expected, and they found it was due to general fears about cloud-based file sync and share services as well as the disruption of learning a new system. Toh and his team responded by conducting "Boxing Day" events at multiple Avago sites through Asia, Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States during September and October 2012 to introduce the service locally. Aside from using Box for PC backup and to replace aging file system software and servers, many teams inside Avago have begun to use Box systematically, including: The legal team uses Box as its primary document management system after evaluating legal software for the same purpose. Box is used for managing contracts, procurement, and patentrelated documents. It allows the department to manage access and permissions to documents while monitoring their usage. The recent integration of Box with DocuSign allows signed contracts to be synced directly with Box. In acquisitions, Box allows employees to maintain a single, audited document trail (instead of multiple versions in multiple threads), which can be viewed at any time. Security is improved because Box allows administrators to restrict access at the folder level. Sales and marketing employees use Box for external collaboration with vendors and distributors, sharing large files such as marketing proofs and keeping files with brochures and posters organized. Previously, file attachment size limits slowed sharing through and specialized FTP clearance took valuable time and involved IT. In research and development, Avago engineers update a single clean room desktop, and Box automatically syncs to the rest of the clean room desktops without human intervention. Roughly 600 lab technicians use iphones and ipads to enable file sharing and collaboration. One year into Box adoption, Avago acquired LSI, which doubled the size of the company and more than doubled its head count. LSI was a Microsoft shop with extensive use of SharePoint. Box was extended to 6,000 LSI accounts, bringing the total number of Box users to 10,000. Box was available, and Avago and LSI users began collaborating on day 1, post closing. Back-Office and Partner Process Improvements Avago incorporated Box into its back-office systems to archive invoices and purchase orders. This involved using Box's APIs to integrate with Avago's ERP system. Custom workflows were developed to capture and move invoices and purchase orders to Box as a repository. This integration eliminated manual uploads, and the invoices are now accessible in real time to all support teams; both represent productivity improvements. There were also cost reductions with the integration. Under the Box Enterprise plan, storage is unlimited. "By moving that to Box, the IT team doesn't have to keep adding disk space or worry about the storage refresh every five years because Box takes care of that," Toh said. "IT doesn't have to 2014 IDC #

5 worry about backup because Box manages this. And IT doesn't have to worry about security because files in transit and at rest are encrypted. Storage maintenance costs are also eliminated." On the partner side, Box privileges were granted to partners, and Avago no longer requires partners to use VPNs to connect to needed content. Future Plans For Avago, the use of Box to bring down IT costs will continue to be important. SharePoint is the next target, with Toh and his team focused on how to shift the users from the LSI acquisition from SharePoint and fully onto Box. Another area of focus is using Box more extensively with mobile, including both smartphones and tablets. Challenges and Solution All technology adoption has strengths and challenges. For Avago, the benefits side of the ledger outweighs the challenges. Challenges As employees began to regularly adopt Box in their departments and teams, Avago did encounter challenges, including: The need for a Linux Server sync module was felt. The inability of the latest version of Box to support a single user who has different Box accounts was exposed. An example is the inability for the team responsible for testing to have both a personal and a testing account, which they need. While the idea of Box Notes has potential, it is too basic to be useful inside Avago. Box doesn't support real-time collaboration. While a Box strength is the ability to edit and open files directly in productivity applications, such as Excel, and even lock the files, Box does not allow two or more users to edit the same file at the same time and share the changes in real time. Toh said users use Google Drive when they need real-time collaboration, and this feature is also available in SharePoint. While Avago has plans to shut down SharePoint and replace it with Box, the lack of this feature will create a gap in functionality. Although Box has APIs to connect with workflow tools, Box had no built-in workflow at the time. Since then, Box has introduced policies and automation, and this is an area of investment for Box. Benefits The implementation of Box at Avago resulted in a variety of savings and productivity gains, including: Avago benefited from speed of implementation and adoption. With a company growing through acquisitions, the ability to rapidly extend services to users from the newly acquired company increases the speed to business as usual for the employees IDC #

6 Avago eliminated infrastructure and management expenses related to PC backup, file sharing, document management, network usage (including traffic), VPNs, disaster recovery, storage, and life-cycle management. Direct operational cost savings exceed $500,000 annually, but Avago expects to avoid multiple millions of dollars of future capital and operational expenses from its adoption of Box. Ease of collaboration across regions improved as Avago moved traffic off of local servers that were creating performance bottlenecks to Box's cloud. In addition, employees who could once collaborate only locally or regionally can now collaborate globally, and the collaboration and files are secured with encryption, audit logs, and access notifications. Box also enables IT to provide needed information to legal in case of litigation. Because documents are now centrally located and easily accessed, users are providing positive feedback about productivity gains. User recoverability is also faster. When an employee loses a laptop or forgets a laptop, or a hard drive crashes, he/she picks up a loaner and has immediate access to his/her files stored on Box. Back-office productivity has also improved through the adoption of workflow automation connected with Box. Results Lessons Learned Buy-In from the Top Is Critical According to Stanley Toh, IT director, Enterprise End User Services, Avago: The most important thing you need to do is you get the support of the CEO and the COO. Both of them are also very supportive of cloud initiatives. We are a semiconductor company, so margins and cost efficiency are very important to us. All the cloud solutions that we have implemented have so far been more cost efficient, and it also makes it much easier for the end user to use it and adopt. So they are very supportive of this strategy. Even when we were implementing Google Mail, we had people who were complaining that they were moving from Exchange, that they love Outlook. But when we moved from Exchange to Google, we actually saved $1.25 million on 3,000 accounts. So that's a huge savings. The CEO would definitely support that. Your business is still going; you're still able to do your , your calendar for meetings and collaboration; and whatever and whatnot, and you save $1.2 million. What's not to like from a CEO perspective? Buy-In from the Business Requires Internal Marketing To be successful with file sync and share on the user side, buy-in from the business is required. Business users learn how to do their work with existing resources. For example, they are comfortable with internal file shares because they can open those with Windows Explorer. Because the use of Box changes how files are accessed, business users need to understand the advantages. When a decision is made to migrate file shares to Box, the company saves money. But business users also need to see the productivity benefits IDC #

7 Pushback from users who adopted a different file sharing service can also be a significant challenge. In those cases, not everyone needs to be convinced. Once just enough users began adopting, their colleagues began to adopt in order to continue collaborating. To make this happen, marketing is very important, according to Toh. Supplementing the marketing is training. Training Helps with Business Buy-In A successful implementation requires training. Avago used two types of pre-installation workshops. The first workshop is a 45-minute in-person presentation and light demo. The second workshop is a 45-minute workshop where users can try the solution out. Toh advises that the classrooms not be too big. His team aims for a maximum of users with two trainers. These workshops should be conducted before implementation. "We usually have 20, we have a sign-up sheet, and every two-hour class, we have people maximum. We have two trainers, and then the workshop is where you get the people hooked. That is before you implement and push out." Once the implementation is completed, Avago runs what it calls "IT clinics." This is similar to visiting a doctor. Users bring in their PC, and the team diagnoses the problem and helps them out. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Many organizations face the same issues that Avago has successfully dealt with over the past few years with its adoption of Box. Multisite IT environments that span country and regional boundaries, lack of uniformity in collaboration and backup functions, rapidly growing storage and archiving requirements, and the increased need for business agility are all symptoms of the need for an enterprise to closely examine file sync and share as a viable and valuable solution to one or more of these use cases. Avago's clear demonstration of cost savings points to the benefits. Beyond the savings, we're also in the middle of a huge transformation that blurs the lines between the internal operational focus of an enterprise and the external focus on customers and the delivery of goods and services to those customers. As this transformation evolves, blurred lines between the four walls and outside the four walls will accelerate. That means, the expensive controls implemented for the past 20 years to protect knowledge assets are rapidly becoming obsolete. This, in turn, accelerates the urgency of adopting systems that support the development and protection of knowledge assets. We recommend you take three immediate actions: Evaluate how business is collaborating with trusted partners, business service providers, and customers and where there are inefficiencies or productivity frustrations currently IDC #

8 Look at gaps and potential cost savings in the major workloads associated with file sync and share: cross-device sync, file collaboration, business use of FTP, PC backup and recovery, mobile file access and sharing, and back-office file-centric process improvement. Given work patterns that take employees outside the office and outside the four walls of the enterprise and where nonemployees are collaborating to develop important assets, assess how protected and secure your knowledge assets are, particularly if a member of a team developing critical content is not an employee. Are their backups available to you? If they lose their mobile device or laptop, are you at risk and can you recover the content? What if they quit or leave the project? If you find opportunities or vulnerabilities through this assessment, you are very likely to see productivity and process improvements as well as cost savings similar to Avago's. LEARN MORE Related Research Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Business File Sharing Cloud Software, 2013 (IDC #245103, December 2013) 2014 IDC #

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