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Inteva Charts New Course with SaaS

Inteva's CIO faced a complete overhaul of his company's IT environment after a spinoff. A SaaS ERP helped his team shift its focus from systems to business alignment.

By Dennis Hodges

November 09, 2008 — CIO — One of my summer jobs in college was working on a boat that supplied drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. We would set out, often at night, to a point on a map. This was in the pre-GPS days, so our autopilot did not account for the ocean's currents. As a deckhand, it was my role to watch the helm while the captain got some rest before the real action started. I would have to adjust the autopilot to correct for the drift we encountered.

Fast forward to today. I am again in the position of charting course, this time as the CIO for a new company. And just as before, it requires constant attention to reach our destination.

My company, Inteva, began its life as a division of Delphi Automotive before being sold to a private equity investor March 1, 2008. Our division, which makes automotive interior and door components, was sold since it was not considered to be a core business for Delphi. I came on board September 1, 2007, as CIO for the new company, six months before we were to be spun off. My task was to determine where we wanted to go "after we grew up."

One thing was certain: We were going to be a much smaller organization than we had been before the spin-off. Yet despite our size, we still faced the challenges of a global organization since the new company has 13 manufacturing and engineering facilities in Western Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region (APAC). IT would need to offer a level of service that is more difficult to provide when compared to servicing an organization that works within a single boundary or region. To complicate matters, the Transition Service Agreement that was being negotiated gave Inteva just twelve months to migrate the entire infrastructure and application environment away from the former parent. So, we were a startup company with a ninety-year history.

The Need for Change

We faced a complete overhaul of our IT environment. In addition, I was challenged by our CEO to reduce IT costs dramatically (dropping from two percent of revenue to less than one percent). To accomplish this would require a new mind-set with radically different solutions to our requirements. SaaS, NaaS, and AaaS would be the only options we would have to make this type of change in such a short period. We've all heard by now of SaaS—software as a service. In some corners, I've heard of NaaS—network as a service. Some people go as far as saying AaaS—anything as a service, including communication, infrastructure and platforms. I am working to implement all three.

 

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