Customer success
Hollard Group
"It's the personal relationship with Orbus that really takes it over the top."
Enterprise Architect
Pulkit Kapur
AT A GLANCE
Industry
Insurance
Region
EMEA
Use Case
Enterprise Architecture
The Challenge
Hollard were iServer users, but needed an EA tool that could offer full cloud support for their cloud-first approach.
They also hoped to open up EA to the wider business and encourage more collaboration.
Hollard Group is a privately owned insurance group based in South Africa. Established in 1980, the company employs more than 2,000 people and operates across a number of African countries. Hollard have been OrbusInfinity users for several years and were eager to implement OrbusInfinity.
Motivation to Upgrade
Two key features of OrbusInfinity persuaded Hollard to look to migrate. The first was cloud capability; Hollard is becoming a cloud-first company and wanted an EA tool that could offer full cloud support.
The second feature was collaboration. For Hollard architect Pulkit Kapur, improving collaboration throughout the company was absolutely key, and OrbusInfinity’s integration with SharePoint and Teams opens up EA to the wider business. Kapur emphasized that the ‘consumers’ of EA, such as technical teams and analysts, have more visibility for the output of the EA team. Having SharePoint as the document repository is far more accessible to the wider business as they can more easily view and manage relevant information with no requirements for additional training.
Similarly, the new out-of-the-box dashboards available in OrbusInfinity have contributed to greater participation from senior management. EA can often be complex and difficult to understand for management interested in quick decision-making, so features
such as easy-to-use Application Rationalization dashboards greatly simplify the process for decision-making.
The Result
Hollard opted to migrate to OrbusInfinity to take advantage of its cloud capabilities and Microsoft 365 integration.
A strong personal relationship with Orbus Software made the migration process easy for Hollard.
The Transition
Due to the strong relationship between Orbus Software and Hollard Group, Hollard were enthusiastic adopters of OrbusInfinity and needed little persuasion to attend a demo of the software. Hollard was already attracted to the cloud features of OrbusInfinity, but the demonstration of the extensive Microsoft 365 integration really impressed Kapur and the team. The ability to seamlessly use Teams and SharePoint with OrbusInfinity solved a major problem for the team. At the same time, Hollard was attracted by the platform's flexibility, with the option to quickly scale up or scale down their commitment depending on their needs.
Hollard Group has a large architecture team, with around 15-20 architects who were present for the demonstration. After the demo, the team was asked for their opinions on migrating to OrbusInfinity and the response was unanimous: everyone was impressed.
The Future
Hollard is still in the early days of their OrbusInfinity experience and haven’t yet had time to fully explore the benefits that the product can bring, but it is already being used across the business, in all business units. It is easier for the EA team to keep everyone updated on the latest developments, and Kapur hopes that the greater ease of use will encourage more people to contribute and help to improve data quality. There is almost a virtuous cycle, in which the positive impacts of OrbusInfinity bring more people on board, which in turn improves the reach and quality of content in the tool, allowing for further impacts across the enterprise.
On advice for other companies adopting similar migrations, Kapur stressed the need for clean data before any migration takes place, as well as the importance of knowing your customizations. Customizations can easily be forgotten once implemented, which leads to problems if important changes are missing after migration.
The relationship with Orbus remains a high point, even after 3.5 years. Kapur commented that a tool can meet their needs, but it is the personal relationships that ‘take it over the top’ and really contribute to long-term success. Hollard
feel that they can get assistance and training from Orbus whenever it is required, whatever is required.