Case study: Langs Building Supplies turns to digital tools to get the job done

Legacy businesses usually have long standing technology that needs to be refreshed, especially when they are trying to keep up with their digitally-savvy competitors and to generate more revenue.

Langs Buildings Supplies is a construction business, established in 1976, its services needed a digital revamp to, according to its chief information officer, Matthew Day.

“We had a lot of technology that need to be refreshed because budgets have been put on hold. There was compute storage, networking budgets that needed to be refreshed,” he said.

Day said the need to upgrade a number of services turned into an opportunity to figure out what else needed to be fixed to become a profit centre, not a cost centre.

“I could holistically look at the entire environment and decide what we can put together that makes the most sense. The other part of this was, how do I get better budgets? How do I go from being asked to do more with less, to being asked to do more with more?” he said.

In 2012, Langs implemented Nutanix as a test run at first, after the trial period, Day said he deployed the software throughout the whole business.

“We started with a small test pilot of virtual desktop infrastructure and the reason we started with that is I had some staff that I wanted to go to work from home easily. Within a week we had expanded and within another week, every workload Langs had was on it,” he said.

All of the company’s mission critical applications, factory management software and tools were transformed to Nutanix.

“From start to finish, six months done, and the biggest determining factor there was just management making up their mind to do it,” he said.

Day said he had to “break the mold” of doing tasks a certain way.

“We’re not afraid of change, we're rapid adopters. Nutanix proved to the business that you can take a punt and get good payback.

“Langs doesn't invest in products, we invest in people with the same sort of values as ourselves, and people with integrity and vision. I guess that's what we found in Nutanix, the leadership from the top down, had a vision that were authentic about it. And the integrity was second to none, that integrity is still there today,” he added.