From Three to One: How OTA Insight Migrated Two Acquired Companies to the main Google Workspace Domain

About the customer

From the very beginning of 2012, OTA Insight’s vision is to provide user-friendly revenue management tools, as well as becoming the global leader in data intelligence for the hospitality industry.

Since then, OTA Insight has won many industry awards and has been named UK’s 17th fastest-growing private technology company in The Sunday Times Fast Track Hiscox #TechTrack100. OTA Insight has grown to become the preferred revenue management solution for over 60,000 independent, local and global chain properties in more than 185 countries, supported by 400+ stellar employees.

The Challenge

Migrating from one Google Workspace to another can be a complex process, as it involves moving a large amount of data and ensuring that all of the necessary permissions and settings are properly configured.

One of the biggest challenges in a Google Workspace migration is ensuring that all of the data is properly transferred. This includes not only email and calendar data but also documents, contacts, and any other data that is stored within the Google Workspace environment. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if the amount of data is large, which was the case for several users in this project.
One of the challenges faced during the migration process was posed by a particular user who had an enormous amount of data to be transferred. Specifically, this user had 900 gigabytes of mails and almost 9 Terabytes of files that needed to be migrated, which is a difficult task for any migration environment.

Another challenge is ensuring that all of the necessary permissions and settings are properly configured in the new Google Workspace environment. This includes setting up the correct access levels for users, as well as configuring any custom settings or applications that were used in the old environment.

Additionally, It’s important to ensure that all the custom domains, email routing, and email security are properly configured to avoid any interruption in the email services because we don’t want our users to be deprived of their emails for even a single minute.

And last but not least; ensure the compatibility of the custom applications built on the old Google suite environment with the new Google suite environment. This required additional time and resources to update the applications to work with the new environment.

The Goal 

The goal of this migration was to incorporate the two companies acquired into the main Google Workspace Domain while minimising the impact on day-to-day operations.

The Solution

To address this challenge, OTA Insight used the Google Workspace Migrate tool in collaboration with Devoteam G Cloud, to aid them in incorporating the two acquired companies.

To complete the merger without any interruptions, it was important to utilise a supporting migration tool that could guarantee:  :

• minimal downtime for end users
• ensuring data transfers using the migration tool technology
• migrating mail, calendar, and drive in a uniform method
• no end-user passwords needed, so privacy is secured

The biggest focus was to make sure:

• the data is transferred securely
• end-users are aware (read here how we covered this part of the migration)
• end-users can adapt and comprehend the change
• users do not experience downtime during the process.

Once the Google Workspace domains were moved and merged,  both companies involved could start the next steps in their integration journey. 

The Result

As a result, both acquisitions migrated towards a single Google tenant, allowing OTA Insight to manage its Digital Workplace more easily and allowing end-users to collaborate more efficiently across the organisations.

After the merger, Devoteam G Cloud also guided and assisted Ota Insight in the new accounts and mitigating any changes to our day-to-day work environment. Read more about the change management approach at OTA Insight here