At the Amsterdam-based work and learning company Pantar had cloud technology high on its agenda from 2018. Being able to work ‘Anytime, anywhere and on any device’ was a key objective for Pantar for the future. That led to a tender in 2019 to set up the organization’s approximately 350 workstations in that new way. Pantar chose the offer from PQR – rustmakers in IT – in part because of its strong emphasis on technology adoption.
Pantar is one of the three largest learning and working companies in the Netherlands. From seven locations, the organization helps some three thousand long-term unemployed and people distant from the labor market on their way to regular jobs. The focus is on the Amsterdam and Diemen region. People can work through Pantar or gain work experience in plant services, in a production environment or as a traffic controller.
From Citrix to the cloud
The approximately 350 office employees were still using a Citrix environment until May 2020. This platform limited Pantar in the deployment of modern IT capabilities. In addition, more and more applications were offered as Software-as-a-Service through the cloud. Pantar wrote a tender in which suppliers had to provide a stable, secure and reliable ICT facility for its employees so that they can perform their work efficiently and quickly on an ‘anytime, anywhere and any device’ basis. To this end, a portal workspace had to be set up to provide access to all applications used at clients. A large number of services were also covered by the tender, including the necessary data communications connections, management services for the workstations, mobile device management, firewalls, VPN, spam filter, backup, restore and antivirus. The vendor also had to perform the entire migration process.
Adoption and SpaceHub
Pantar chose PQR’s offer after the selection process. Important considerations for the organization for that choice included the strong emphasis on adoption and the deployment of PQR SpaceHub. Adoption, in PQR’s view, is crucial to the effectiveness of an IT project. Therefore, PQR paid great attention in its proposal to developing employees’ digital skills in the form of intensive workshops and training and personal coaching immediately after the migration. With SpaceHub, PQR is responding to the desire of many companies to move to the cloud securely, in a controlled manner and at their own pace. SpaceHub is a modular hybrid multi-cloud platform for consulting, implementation and management of modern workspace and data center solutions. For Pantar, PQR built an intuitive, single sign-on environment , providing a trusted and reliable uncluttered workspace with all the applications employees need. It is a mix of SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and, depending on the function, also financial applications such as Exact. Applications that cannot be purchased as a service run within SpaceHub, with PQR working with cloud specialist Uniserver in the case of Pantar. Pantar’s applications and data that cannot be accessed from the public cloud land on an IaaS platform provided by Uniserver.
Migration
The transition to the new workplace caused headaches for the teams at PQR and Pantar. The corona crisis put pressure on agreed delivery times of equipment and connections, and the adoption path regarding the education and training programme had to be adjusted from physical to virtual. Thanks to a close collaboration between PQR, Pantar and PQR’s partners (including Adoptify, Veenman and Uniserver) and their professionalism, knowledge, commitment and flexibility, all parties involved look back on a very successful transition achieved in one weekend.
“It required a lot of commitment, flexibility, creativity and resilience from everyone. It is great to see a group of specialists with a common goal achieve great results organically.”
– Joffri Roodselaar,Coordinator IT, Contract Manager & CISO at Pantar
Results
Pantar employees quickly embraced the possibilities of the new workplace. For example, communication via Microsoft Teams’ chat feature reduced mail traffic by forty percent within two weeks. Employees also appreciated the meeting capabilities of Teams. The approximately 180 active users of Microsoft Teams soon had an average of 40 online meetings daily. Paper consumption has also decreased significantly as employees become more digitally proficient. Meanwhile, the adoption rate has already increased further. This is an ongoing process.
Solid base
The new workplace has laid a solid foundation for the future. Pantar will work with PQR to further expand the environment so that it consistently adds value to the business. Pantar also plans to do more to optimize its information strategy and implement data-driven policies. Security, privacy and keeping up with technological developments also figure high on the list of priorities.