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AstraZeneca brings its email bang up to date
Case study: How the pharmaceutical giant worked with HP to migrate almost 70,000 users

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Wednesday 23 January 2008

Global pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca, has just completed a huge project to upgrade its ageing email system, helping the company reduce the number of servers it uses and save money.

The company worked with HP to move 66,000 email accounts in around 60 countries - HP's biggest ever migration project - onto a new bespoke email system over a six-month period.

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Speaking to silicon.com, Gary Keogh, global programme manager at AstraZeneca, said: "We hadn't invested in the email system for maybe 10 years or more, so we needed a big, big replacement project. The old system was becoming out of date from a support point of view."

All the hardware was replaced, the operating system was upgraded and the application was upgraded to the latest release as well. "It was quite some challenge," he said.

The new email system was designed by HP Services and Microsoft based on the Exchange 2003 platform.

The migration was carried out with both old and new systems running parallel to each other to reduce disruption. HP was also able to prepare and synchronise a significant amout of data in advance.

Keogh said: "The challenge was how to do that by creating a duplicate parallel system that sat alongside the old system and was completely synchronised. So users could be on either of the virtual systems and it would effectively, from their point of view, feel the same."

The average interruption of service was just 15 minutes per user and when the migration was in full swing, around 2,000 mailboxes were being migrated overnight.

Keogh said: "At the same time as doing all of that [running a parallel system], the key principle from the business was there must be no downtime of the email system at any time over that period."

The new system has also seen a 60 per cent reduction in the number of servers that AstraZeneca runs around the world creating significant cost savings.

It also allows greater collaboration between workers in the company by allowing them to view calendars to organise meetings, while the security has also been improved.

But Keogh said the migration was a challenge, especially at the beginning. He said: "The reality is it was anything but easy. Initially we struggled to do 200 [mailboxes] a day."

This eventually went up to 2,000 migrations per day after HP introduced some new processes and the central support centre was up and running.

Keogh concluded: "We're delighted with the success of the project. It's one of those things, if you do it well, nobody really notices."