AlixPartners & endjin

Digitally transforming an organisation from the inside out.

AlixPartners is a results-driven global consulting firm that specializes in helping businesses successfully address their most complex and critical challenges when it really matters.

In 2017 AlixPartners turned to endjin to help with establishing and enabling a new Digital Office, designed to turn many of the consulting-led offerings into productised, data driven, intelligent tools.

Over the next 2 years, endjin became a trusted and valued partner, working closely with the AlixPartners team on numerous and varied projects. Starting with Elevate - a custom built procurement analysis tool - endjin not only delivered the first custom product the firm had invested in, but established a core set of DevOps patterns and practices within the team that would be invaluable as the Digital Office grew.

Azure adoption

As Azure experts, endjin also acted as trusted advisors around cloud architecture and services, not only with the Digital Office, but within the wider consulting team within the strategic adoption of the platform.

A key stakeholder in this adoption was the Engagement Technical Support (ETS) team - a dedicated IT Support function with the sole remit of enabling Consultants' success on customer engagements. Tasked with everything from infrastructure provisioning and application deployments, to data movement and security and compliance, they needed to get a handle on the Azure ecosystem quickly to support the fast pace of adoption amongst the consulting teams.

endjin worked closely with the ETS team throughout each project stream, educating, advising and enabling their own capability around designing and supporting secure cloud architectures.

The endjin team has played a significant role in bootstrapping myself, and my team with the latest Azure technologies and DevOps practices & principals. Thanks to knowledge sharing and extensive time spent with the endjin team, I've been able to come up to speed on Azure tech faster than I could have ever anticipated.

— Larry Lubinski, Architecture & Automation Manager - Cloud, SVP, AlixPartners

Custom application development

A key change in the firm with the creation of the Digital Office was the move towards productised consulting offerings. Backing up an engagement with a pre-packaged, intelligent, data driven application allowed the team to get to value and insights with the customer quicker.

endjin designed and built a variety of products for AlixPartners, across a number of different business units. Each product built on the success of the last - evolving best practice cloud and data architectures as the team became more comfortable with Azure, and the pace of innovation increased.

The endjin team has aided in bringing to life some very important platforms for the AlixPartners firm. Their solutions are being utilized by our consultants and have received positive feedback. From the technology aspect, their solutions have made the time to market, for some extremely technical platforms, hours, rather than the weeks/months it would usually take. This has been due largely in part to the DevOps experience that the endjin team brings to the table.

— Larry Lubinski, Architecture & Automation Manager - Cloud, SVP, AlixPartners

DevOps enablement

Central to the successful delivery of the Digital Office products and tools was the solid foundation around DevOps and automation. As a core part of endjin's delivery model, we brought decades of experience in modern, best practice software development processes and applied them in a way that was reusable across the team, from project to project.

Endjin has helped our firm get into and using new technologies. Their solutions and knowledge sharing that has been executed as part of the journey with endjin has been implemented across multiple projects. The endjin team has helped with getting our organization into a DevOps mindset and to utilize Azure technologies as part of our own solutions.

— Larry Lubinski, Architecture & Automation Manager - Cloud, SVP, AlixPartners

Proof of concept execution

Many of the business problems that the Digital Office were trying to solve required deep technical expertise, and there were no guarantees of success in some of the technical challenges that endjin were faced with.

endjin applied a structured experimentation based approach to proof of concept execution to solve the hardest problems - documenting detailed lab notes to present recommendations around architecture and design to meet strict non-functional requirements.

Often website quotes are full of token platitudes, however, hand on heart, endjin have been the most consistent, high quality partners I have ever used. One of the key highlights was help in designing an Azure solution to help process over 1.5B rows of data to display to the user in less then 3 seconds, with the help of endjin we had a solution in under 12 weeks.

— Cuan Mulligan, Director, Digital Transformation, AlixPartners

Data plaform expertise

Central to every project that endjin delivered for AlixPartners was a deep understanding of the Azure data platform, and how to best apply it to the business use case. As a professional services company, AlixPartners live and breath their customers' data and endjin helped the team ingest, process, transform and visualise it in the best ways possible - securely, in the cloud, at scale.

endjin's vast experience across the Azure data platform services allowed them to utilise the right tool for the job in each product - from Blob Storage, to Cosmos DB, to Databricks, to Azure Analysis Services.