Liantis

Vision

Offering services digitally highlights the need for a stable, scalable and flexible ITC platform

As often happens with established companies operating complex systems, Liantis’s legacy systems had data islands. “We had overcapacity on every single island, which meant we weren’t spending our euros in the most efficient way possible,” explains John Helsmoortel, IT Infrastructure and Services Manager at Liantis.

One of the elements that sets Liantis apart from their competitors is their ability to do transactions fast. They’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of customers’ salary information and sensitive personal employee data.

After the pandemic broke out, the Belgian government provided financial support to self-employed people, business owners and entrepreneurs. Suddenly, Liantis’ monthly payroll calculations had to handle additional financial data.

In light of these changing circumstances, the company wanted to consolidate their applications into a single, unified solution for better performance, and outsource the management of the environment to a third party. This would allow their IT team to focus on innovative new solutions instead of the day-to-day management of infrastructure, and shift their focus from hardware to software.

The solution would have to combine on-premises data handling and working in the cloud to comply with Belgium’s complicated payroll legislation and HR policies. And, because different regions have different policies, salary bonuses and language requirements, the platform would have to be adaptable.

Liantis also wanted their new data environment to be agile and future-proof, able to adapt to workforce disruption and legislative change, needing to handle 300,000 salary calculations and up to 17,000 queries in under three seconds.

Transformation

Migrating to the future with Dell Technologies and VMware-based IT infrastructure

Liantis initially consulted with Dell Technologies for a solution. During the discussion, Dell recommended us as a partner to assist with migration and managed services. Having worked closely with the Dell team on multiple occasions we conducted a thorough assessment of the current environment and what solutions would best suit. Liantis’s needs This approach allows us the ensure that we minimize any issues during the delivery phase.

We worked with Dell to smoothly migrate their old environment (based on Oracle Exadata) to to a flexible and modular virtualized infrastructure with Dell Servers, Dell EMC storage and backup hardware, and VMware virtualization solutions. The new environment is fast, reliable and compatible with Oracle. Their web-based applications are powered by a combination of Oracle and Java and need to be regularly managed and backed up on a single, stable and secure platform to avoid downtime or loss of critical data.

“Together with NTT, we built a new data center solution. We have actually centralized all our workloads on one hypervisor, one hardware and one backup solution. So that’s really removed a lot of complexity for our engineers. We really have an environment which we now have under control.” John Helsmoortel, IT Infrastructure and Services Manager, Liantis

We manage the backup, maintenance and help reduce the licensing costs of Liantis’s Oracle environments and manage the hardware and virtualization layers for Liantis.

Results

Managed environment enables Liantis to focus fully on innovation

Thanks to Dell’s technology, our expertise and reliable service, and the flexibility and ease of management achieved by the VMware virtualization layer, Liantis now has a scalable and responsive platform for their Oracle applications with a 30% improvement in speed. This allows them to provide the best possible service in a much more cost-effective way.

Using a managed service provider for their infrastructure allows Liantis’s IT team to focus on the range of integrated services the company already offers and build on them for the future.

Migrating to an integrated solution with VMware allows the company remove silos and overprovisioning; reducing redundant expenditure.