Httpool, now part of Aleph Company Group, is the largest global partner of major media platforms (and when we say major, we really mean it — think Twitter, LinkedIn, or Spotify). They support growth and drive business results for traditional and digital native advertisers across over 30 selected European and Asian markets.
Seasoned mother company in their back — Aleph Group — with over 17 years of experience, is the leading global enabler of digital advertising in emerging countries. While only 13% of the world’s population experiences 64% of the total global digital advertising spend, their mission is to power the digital ecosystems unlocking their economic growth. Their solutions make it more accessible for advertisers to understand and grow their digital investments.
The need for a unified workspace
The offices and colleagues of Httpool are distributed all around Europe, America, Africa, and Asia, with different entities, digital workspaces, various license models, and multiple IT teams. As challenging as it may sound, Httpool managed to build a stable and successful team even so. But around a year ago, they realized there might be a better way.
“We decided on GWS consolidation due to general consolidation and reorganization inside our firm, and technical resources are a part of it as well. This saves us the trouble of handling multiple tenants. While not impossible to do, doing processes on an unoptimized platform takes time and resources away from other priorities, especially if you have a smaller team. Of course, there are also other benefits to consolidations, like lower costs of licenses and better tenant plans, as well as easier communication & fewer issues between our company and user interactions.” Klemen Gumzej — IT Supervisor
Realizing the challenge, they started to look into an area of Google Workspace to Google Workspace migrations. But what might seem like the easiest migration of them all is, in reality, a tough challenge. Understanding the objective, Revolgy boarded this mission. We brought together the technical knowledge and the added business value of a unified environment.
“Migrating different Google Workspace domains under one primary domain is usually a good idea that brings you lots of benefits — starting with simplified IT governance, better identity management or having a single point of truth for all security policies. With all your licenses consolidated and billed under one domain, you can likely get a better commercial offering for your Google Workspace price.” Daniel Čech — Revolgy Customer Engineer
Overcoming the challenge
A project as complex as this one, with around 35 entities and close to one thousand users, is not something we could do without clients’ support. We always strive for close cooperation, not black-box thinking, showing behind-the-scenes and sharing know-how along the way. This time it was no different. Right in the beginning, we set up daily stand-ups and a roadmap to ensure a smooth run of the project.
The biggest and trickiest part of the migration is its preparation phase — the pre-migration. In this phase, our cooperation was the closest. During the pre-migration, we created the temporary names of users to move the data successfully from one place to another without confusion or loss. Once everything was properly named, we pre-migrated emails and Google Drive data — basically making a copy of everything.
“The challenge is to migrate everyone at once, so you can just come back to work on Monday morning and voila! Everything looks perfectly the same as when you left.” Jakub Jan Kučera — Revolgy Google Workspace team lead
When the go-live weekend came, all the pre-migration needed to be finished. The main migration consists of renaming the original domain, removing it, and waiting until it’s free again. Then, we add this domain to the new destination and verify it via DNS. One of the last crucial steps is renaming the temporary names to their correct form. After all this is done, smaller migrations for calendars, events, or contacts take place.
“Despite the challenge of migrating all 35 entities and the complexity of this project, our Project team under Revolgy guidance successfully migrated the Google Workspaces to our satisfaction. The cooperation between the teams was very smooth and professional.” Rok Romih — Aleph Holding Global IT manager
Change of work mindset
Part of the project was not only the migration but also the adoption of a higher license which comes with new features and an advanced environment. We provided training enabling our clients to use 100% of their potential.
IT governance and pricing are sometimes not the only things changing. Even though this was not the case with Httpool, as they are digital natives and know their way around digital workspaces. Sometimes, the users might struggle with the new environment or its change. Having a partner at your back is a vital advantage in those situations as we might help with “change management”, i.e. structured assistance in convincing employees that change would be for the better.
The advantages of a single workspace
The biggest improvement resulting from Google Workspace to Google Workspace migration is the unified IT administration. Having a single point of truth for all security policies, identity oversight, and data management is a great enhancement. It is lessening not only the human force behind it but also the cost and the complexity of the processes. Before the migration, managing all separate tenants within one team was very challenging. After the migration, a single IT team is enough for the whole Aleph Group.
In November 2021, we migrated Httpool’s 31 consolidated domains, 960 accounts, and a total of nearly 22 TB of data. In the first half of 2022, we completed migrating three projects — IMS, AdDynamo, and SocialSnack — with over 170 accounts and nearly 12 TB of data.
In the last quarter of 2022, there were three migration projects — VoWMade, Genart Medya, and 10Midia — with three consolidated domains and four migrated accounts.
Cost reduction and getting the best level of licenses were other advantages. With around a thousand end-users unified under one roof, we negotiated a significant price reduction while simultaneously upgrading to a higher license plan. Our cooperation will last for several years, so the customer can keep the price stable.
“Considering our current growth, we can easily say that we saved even more due to the increases in user license count since our partnership.” Klemen Gumzej — IT Supervisor
In the end, the Aleph Group decided to proceed with another four projects with us, and we are happy to call them our clients.
Revolgy helps companies migrate to the cloud. Get in touch with us to discuss options and possibilities for your business.
