Acknowledged as a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in 2015 for their innovative approach to orchestrate the execution of hybrid data center migrations, Transitional Data Services (TDS) is the leading service provider for planning and executing complex data center transitions and transformations. It is TDS’ experience, approach, methodology and tools which set the company apart from others.
Since its establishment, TDS is helping clients minimize risk, improve project efficiency, and increase migration speed while facilitating more predictable, forward-thinking technical operations for years to come.
Leading Service Provider for IT and Data Center Transformation
TDS established this leadership position by tackling the more challenging aspects of IT transformation. While others have more narrowly tactically on device relocations, virtual migrations and cloud enablement, TDS recognizes that successful transformation requires greater attention to the application dependencies, end-to-end infrastructure interdependencies and alignment with more strategic business issues such as digital transformation, business resiliency, agility and flexibility.
TDS has built TransitionManager Software, specifically to break through the conventional challenges inherent to silo-based approaches. TransitionManager increases velocity of transitions and transformations by breaking down barriers between operating silos, and allowing change to be implemented efficiently across the organization. This allows the IT organization to better accept and embrace the perpetual change which is inherent to IT.
The change to infrastructure and operations should not be considered isolated to IT. Change must be managed in a way that aligns with the business needs and controls. From a business perspective, digital business transformation is undertaken to support one or more key themes, Increase revenue, Reduce cost or Risk mitigation. IT transitions are secondary to these higher level business goals.
Three Key Factors of TDS
TDS is having Deep Technical Experience in all facets of IT. This includes strategy, architecture, implementation, applications development, enterprise systems, leading-edge data center design, and operations. As an example, TDS has been managing the server operations for Kayak.com from early startup while they’ve become a top travel portal on the planet.
They Take Time to Understand Clients Business Needs, risk factors and financial ramifications of every decision so that clients can make recommendations that best align with your short and long term goals.
TDS invented the software TransitionManager, a tool for clients and partners. TransitionManager is their industry-proven, cloud-based IT migration platform that puts their decade of transformation experience into the hands of each of their consultants, and clients project team. This turns chaotic and complicated migration events into a well-orchestrated, methodical solution.
The Process
You cannot understand the full impact of changing anything in IT or the data center with a full understanding of the interdependencies among other applications and infrastructure – servers, database, storage and network. The accurate inventory and cross-silo dependency mapping go hand in hand. TDS can leverage available sources of information to accelerate the generation of inventory and dependency views. TDS typically validates the inventory using short interviews with the various infrastructure and application owners.
According to TDS, as recognized by Gartner and others, transition planning must be broken down into realistic waves or groupings. As you go through this process, you will need to address all interdependencies that will be broken or interrupted in order to avoid unplanned disruption to the business.
TDS can then automatically generate a detailed step by step execution plan to move from clients current to future state. They call this the Runbook. The runbook is generated automatically by applying transition recipes to the inventory migration groups result in an integrated plan to execute the complete migration effort. Unlike more conventional / static approaches, this plan can be incrementally refined and improved along the way until it is time for execution. This agile and adaptive approach is critical to transformation success when taking into account the complexity and constant change inherent to modern IT.
All this leads up to an execution process that is refined, adaptive and orchestrated in real time. The migration team manages their discrete activities in the proper sequence. Command and control functions can operate at a higher level while the detailed task execution is controlled directly with those responsible for each step and in the proper execution sequence. Full visibility and transparency is available to the team so everyone can see the collective progress though dashboards and detailed drill –down if necessary.
Michael Bullock, Professional behind TDS
Michael Bullock is the CEO of TDS, which he founded in 2002. Mike’s vision was to create a new type of professional services company that would focus on delivering efficiency, value and results to TDS clients. Prior to creating TDS, Mike held technology leadership positions with internet startups Student Advantage and iCAST, and previously was Vice President of Technology for Renaissance Worldwide where he managed the technology convergence from 26 portfolio companies as Renaissance grew to become a $1B, public company.
Future Panorama
TDS’ annual service bookings have been growing at an annual compounded rate of 25% per year over the last 7 years. Furthermore, since TransitionManager was publicly introduced in 2014, the company sales growth has accelerated to over 50% annually – and securing its place as one of the top 10 fastest growing data center solution providers profiled by Insight Success. Michael says, “There are two key parts of TDS’ business that feed each other. First, we provide turnkey services to help companies transform their infrastructure and operations (I&O), which includes; Comprehensive Analysis and Planning Services and Physical, Virtual and Cloud Migrations.” Bullock continued, “The other is TransitionManager and the reach through our partner network which has allowed us to sustain our leadership position in the market.”
