John Holland, constructors of essential infrastructure
John Holland is one of Australia’s leading building, infrastructure, rail and transport companies with more than 5,700 employees working in Australia and New Zealand.
John Holland delivers many of Australia’s largest infrastructure projects – from the Melbourne Metro Tunnel and Sydney Metro to the Australian-first Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project in Queensland – as well as significant water, property and urban renewal projects. John Holland also operates buses, trains and trams across the country.
Their diverse experience and expertise enables them to create innovative and enduring solutions for their customers. The fact that they can do this across multiple industry sectors means they’re up for any challenge.
Seeking a single source of truth to match the pace of operations
John Holland led the charge in digitally transforming the construction industry by being a cloud and SaaS-focused business. The John Holland team completed their full migration to AWS Cloud in 2019, allowing them to spearhead their digital transformation projects. However, when they migrated to AWS, the company reached a tipping point, where tool sprawl slowed down processes and created complexity within its IT infrastructure.
Monitoring data is critical to John Holland’s day-to-day operations. This includes maintaining uptime on internal operations to deploy thousands of onsite staff, delivering materials such as concrete or steel and scheduling the delivery of equipment such as cranes to worksites. Operations must be meticulously overseen to ensure projects run on-time, efficiently and on budget. Even a slight bit of downtime can result in delays related to staffing, materials or equipment, which could have significant consequences to project timelines and budgets.
“The scale and size of our company where the user experience ranges from tendering for a project, including scoping and pricing, through to design and deploying IT systems for our construction projects, means we are constantly delivering services to our stakeholders.”
Kier Morrison, General Manager of IT Technology Operations, John Holland Group
To match the pace of operations, where data is constantly growing and consumption is evolving, John Holland built out its data lakes and sought to:
- Adopt digital platforms to manage the diverse workloads across the company
- Leverage the power of data-driven insights to drive business efficiencies and innovation
- Position the company to scale
With the team’s ambitious growth plans and innovation trajectory, John Holland needed a single platform that could provide end-to-end observability across its entire IT stack. The company realized there was a disconnect between its existing solution and its ability to visualize specific configurations of its infrastructure environment to deliver a single source of truth—not just for the operations and IT teams, but across the company including the product, cloud and application teams.
A 40% reduction in IT monitoring costs
By choosing LogicMonitor for hybrid-cloud monitoring, John Holland achieved a single end-to-end view of its entire IT environment to proactively address bottlenecks and technology failures.
The LM Envision platform removed traditional silos to create a democratized pathway for cross-functional teams to capture and present data, collaborate to solve problems and mitigate operational impacts. The business is now able to proactively address the root cause of problems instead of constantly needing to reactively tackle alerts for symptoms that crop up.
Since switching to LogicMonitor, John Holland has gained strong improvements in operational efficiencies, productivity and increased collaboration across its internal teams, including a 40% reduction in IT monitoring costs.
“We started working with LogicMonitor to get sight of our entire IT infrastructure environment and tackle the challenges that arise in a complex environment. However, this quickly enabled us to adopt a more agile approach in our company where problems are solved before our onsite teams even know about them – removing barriers to their productivity. It accelerates the smooth running of day-to-day operations and establishes greater business continuity.”
Kier Morrison General Manager of IT Technology Operations, John Holland Group
Resolving issues proactively without interrupting business operations
“The key benefit of adopting LogicMonitor for my team has been the significant reduction in the time wasted trying to identify the source of a problem. Instead, with one source of truth, we are able to quickly and efficiently identify and resolve issues, often without our onsite team even knowing it has happened.”
Kier Morrison, General Manager of IT Technology Operations, John Holland Group
Since adopting LogicMonitor, John Holland has seen the following benefits in monitoring on-premises, cloud and network infrastructure across the company:
- 40% cost reduction
- 75% reduction in IT monitoring tools – from four fragmented tools to a single unified hybrid observability platform
- Time reduction
- Proactive incident detection and resolution
- Increased collaboration and fewer internal silos
In addition, LogicMonitor’s Australian AWS data center enables John Holland’s monitoring components to sit side-by-side with its IT infrastructure. This allows the company to manage issues in real-time while keeping its data onshore.
“When it comes to our day-to-day operations and user experience, knowing that our network, cloud infrastructure and application layer is performing well is the observability solution we were looking for. LogicMonitor is a solution that guarantees the delivery of a seamless digital experience for those offsite, and enables us to proactively respond and avoid issues that disrupt projects onsite.”
Kier Morrison General Manager of IT Technology Operations, John Holland Group
By combining leading cloud services platform AWS with LogicMonitor’s unmatched end-to-end observability capabilities, John Holland has taken a proactive approach to managing potential failures. The ability to detect issues and resolve problems before they impact business operations enables John Holland’s IT team to ensure that projects continue uninterrupted and focus on delivering and driving digital transformation initiatives rather than day-to-day troubleshooting.