Hands-on consultancy: Legrand Electric UK

Legrand Electric contracted me to help move its UK business systems onto a new virtual server environment. The project meant replacing around 20 physical servers, migrating every critical business application and retiring older systems, all without disrupting the UK operation.

I worked as part of a joint team with Legrand’s French IT professionals, each bringing different specialist skills. My role was hands-on: planning and carrying out the migration of the UK estate, making sure applications ran correctly on the new platform, and bridging the gap between the UK business, the French team and third-party suppliers.

The work included:

• Servers: consolidating around 20 physical servers onto the new virtual infrastructure.
• Applications: moving all critical business applications across, then testing each one before cut-over.
• Email: migrating the legacy Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft Office 365.
• Files: moving company file systems to a new file server, with selected data moved to Office 365 for wider access and collaboration.

The result was a modern, standardised and fully supported platform for Legrand’s UK business, aligned with the wider group’s IT architecture, with legacy systems retired and staff working on current tools.

Core components: virtual server infrastructure, physical-to-virtual (P2V) server migration, business application migration, Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration, file server and Office 365 data migration, and cross-border collaboration with Legrand’s group IT team.