Pliezhausen, December 1, 2020. STARK Deutschland GmbH, a leading builders merchant, relies on IT service provider DATAGROUP. DATAGROUP had undertaken the carve-out of the IT infrastructure from the former parent company, Saint Gobain, and will provide the following IT services going forward: Service Desk, Data Center, Mobile Device Management, End User Services, and Network Services. The contract has a volume of EUR 15m.

The carve-out project started in October 2019. Not only the entire underlying infrastructure of the parent company in France had to be reorganized in DATAGROUP’s data centers in Germany, but all of the approximately 5,000 employees of STARK Deutschland had to be provided with new devices as well. IT carve-out and device replacement were executed successfully and without any restrictions for the users despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus such as the closing of borders and a short-term shortage of hardware.

Due to the guidelines of the former parent company, it was not possible to use the standard migration process via the Veeam security software. DATAGROUP therefore opted for an agile approach in close cooperation with the French IT division. “We manually copied the servers to hard disks and then uploaded the data to our data centers”, says Dino Huber, Manager Business Development DATAGROUP. “It was possible to implement this migration within ten weeks and prior to the corona-related closing of borders for the most part. Without any downtime for the customer.”

Likewise, the effects for the employees were limited to no more than thirty minutes when it came to the backup of user data. For this purpose, DATAGROUP has developed its own tool. The users can back up their data via a simple, intuitive surface and transfer them to the new PC with a stick. This means, the customer retains full data sovereignty.

“DATAGROUP has been a flexible and reliable partner in this project. Together we managed to deliver a successful project in the required period and in a good overall quality despite very challenging general conditions (keyword: corona). There have certainly been restrictions for our employees every now and then. Taken together, however, things were running surprisingly well and without any “real catastrophes”. DATAGROUP has reduced the large ticket volume at the end of the project to an acceptable level in a relatively short time and with a great deal of commitment”, says Dirk Scheffler, Director IT / CIO at STARK Deutschland.

Since the completion of the transition phase at the end of August, DATAGROUP is engaged with providing the following IT outsourcing services for STARK Deutschland: Service Desk, Data Center, Mobile Device Management, End User Services, and Network Services.