Elanco Balances Continuity With Modernization to Create a New and Improved IT Ecosystem

Business Goals

In March of 2019, animal healthcare provider Elanco completed its divestiture from Eli Lilly to become an independent company.

Prior to divestiture, Elanco was completely reliant on IT services from its parent company. It now had to build many systems from scratch, shedding technical debt and legacy systems to overcome barriers to modernization and innovation.

Leveraging a start-up mentality, Elanco set a goal of extracting datasets and applications across systems to create great experiences for its established customers, without disruption.

Integration Challenges

Divesting from a 140-year-old company required building entirely new IT systems. Elanco set a short timeframe to revamp and reconstruct IT systems, addressing the following challenges:

• Ensuring business continuity and customer satisfaction during a structural rebuild-and-shift from on-premises to the cloud
• Tackling technical debt from over 1,100 in-house applications that were central to a variety of critical business processes
• Orchestrating complex data management systems that made it difficult for Elanco to extract Eli Lilly data

How Boomi Helped

Boomi’s cloud-native platform has helped Elanco:

• Facilitate application migrations on a vast scale, across each business function
• Empower Elanco to create a flexible ecosystem via low-code connectors
• Make the shift from fully managed Eli Lilly data centers to Microsoft Azure, interconnecting with source and destination systems through Boomi’s pre-built integrations
• Create a distributed IT model across apps, data centers, and ERP systems to allow the creation of a robust technology foundation

Results

Boomi’s low-code capabilities have allowed Elanco to run a lean, digitally-native organization, reducing the weight of legacy technologies while:

• Synchronizing Microsoft Azure with the broader ecosystem
• Strengthening RSA governance capability, creating a secure, zero-trust IT environment
• Supporting a SaaS-based, highly converged autonomous architecture, making the jobs of Elanco’s 155-strong IT team much easier
• Significantly reducing operational complexity
• Standardizing, and migrating 15,000 users and devices across 50+ countries to a new ERP environment