TDL's Damian Zammit
As the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen many businesses forced to enter lockdown or close entirely, it has also forced some hard re-thinking of how to run a business.
As a result, Thomas Duryea Logicalis (TDL) has developed a 'COVID rapid transformation journey map' to help customers weather the enforced transformation that the pandemic has left on their doorsteps.
In one particular example, a customer in the hospitality sector was ready to roll out Nutanix-based infrastructure across its venues around the country before the coronavirus took hold.
The project, which marks one of the largest Nutanix deployments in the past year, had taken nine months through proof-of-concept and was ready for execution.
But, as isolation measures took hold, both companies moved to working from home, with one of TDL’s engineer’s recreating a test environment in their home, and effectively transforming it into the customer’s venue.
According to TDL, it was hoped the project could still reach completion in anticipation of the eventual easing of social distancing restrictions in Australia.
TDL engagement manager Christian McMinn said during these unprecedented circumstances, TDL knew flexibility and focusing on the mutually beneficial end goal of project deployment would be key for both parties.
"We just had to be creative in how we got it done," he said.
Meanwhile, another TDL customer, this time in the financial sector, purchased a new building site and was ready to prepare three floors of Cisco networking and Wi-Fi infrastructure. Once again, a TDL employee’s house became the grounds of a testing environment.
So are customers still deploying projects as before? Not in the same way, says Damian Zammit, general manager transformation services at TDL.
"Some organisations are barely keeping the lights on and others are fast tracking projects that were previously on hold," he explained.
The end goal for TDL, according to Zammit, is that customers come out of this experience "thriving and ready to disrupt the old ways of working".
In February, TDL’s parent company, Logicalis devised an ‘architects of change’ motto that has been adopted globally, as part of its defined focus on digital transformation in designing, supporting and executing for customers.
“We are focused on making sure we can still service our customers, even during a stressful time and making sure they’re happy we’ve met their needs,” he added.
