LINZ—Land Information New Zealand

Location: New Zealand

Solution: Device42 ITOM

New Zealand lies at the edge of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. The Pacific Plate is moving towards and being subducted below the Australian Plate. These plates are colliding with huge force, causing one to grind over and under the other, and the results can be dangerous for the local communities and unexpected. To complicate matters further the South and North Islands of NZ are slowly moving closer together.

The Land Information Management Agency of the New Zealand government plays a pivotal role. It is tasked with providing and facilitating access to crucial information about the location of various elements on the land, below the surface of the land, and underwater, in a constantly changing environment. 

Recently the government of New Zealand started an initiative to move more of their workloads to the AWS and Azure cloud services. This decision was based on trying to save operating costs while getting onto more modern technology platforms. This is a 3-year program currently underway to move the applications that manage the GEO information and migrate them. To do this, the organization needed to understand all the intricacies of a large set of applications and ensure business continuity during the migration process. 

Supporting over 1,200 users and up to 600 VMs at any given time, many of the tools on the market and those that the team had in-house failed to deliver the complete visibility and dependency mapping needed to make the migration confidently. This led to much frustration and made the data unreliable. 

“We wanted to migrate in an orderly fashion, and using other tools up to this point were not doing what we needed, and their information was incomplete and unreliable.” —Jimi V. 

The LINZ CMDB taskforce, led by Jimi V., started looking into a better solution by investigating and leveraging Gartner’s research. Device42 buoyant market share development in recent years identified as a solution to take a good look at. “When we saw Device42 for the first time, we said this is one awesome piece of software that needs to get recognition!” 

Part of the process of migration for the organization was discovery exercises, to determine what they have in the first place. Typically, there would be up to seven or even ten discovery exercises annually. Jimi conducted a cost/benefit calculation across the various tools. “You can work out the math, on the low end of 6 discoveries annually, Device42 is saving us 90% of the cost associated with the tools we already had that did not provide the level of information we needed. And that’s how much we will potentially reduce the amount of manual effort and costs associated with it annually over the coming 3 years.“

Device42 gave the team the most complete visibility they needed, “with Device42, now we have more accurate information and a single source of truth, and furthermore, we are in the process of integrating Device42 with our ITSM platform.” 

By using Device42, they gained additional benefits, such as:

• Ability to bring many other IT services that were outsourced in-house, using Device42 as the underpinning CMDB. For example, tackling and bringing capacity management in-house and, later the plan is, to bring in change management as well followed by incident management.
• The ability to rationalize, justify, and plan around software licenses.
• For the first time, the architects and the teams managing the environment have an understanding of the correlation of business services to technology.
• And of course—up to 90% cost savings potential in discovery exercises.

When asked what the main reason was you selected Device42, Jimi responded, “Without a question, the information richness in Device42. You can see all the fields, and it is simple to get very detailed information. The richness of the product is mind-boggling. The interface is really straightforward, too!”

Land Information system also leveraged the expertise of Device42 partner TDS to accomplish the results they have achieved.