microsoft and nokia: an it integration...

Published July 2015

The integration between Microsoft and the Nokia Devices and Services division was a massive undertaking involving hundreds of employees from both companies, months of hard work, and collaboration at unprecedented levels. Microsoft IT was at the forefront of the process, playing an essential role in seeing it through.

The announcementLabor Day of 2013 was just another day of labor for Steve Rogozinski and his team.

A general manager in Microsoft IT, Rogozinski had his employees working all weekend to finish building out an integrated manufacturing and supply chain solution for the company. A supply chain is what keeps factories running so they can make products, and the IT role in it is to manage infrastructure.

Stashed away in the basement of Building 34 at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, team members were putting in hours upon hours of overtime.

“We were baselining,” Rogozinski recalls. “I said, ‘Look, we’ve committed, we’re going to get this thing done’.”

When he drove to work that Monday morning, he noticed a lot of cars present for a holiday but dismissed it as simply “something must be going on.” He was laser-focused; after all, he had a project to finish.

Finally, about 3 P.M., the team hit its milestone.

“We felt really great,” he remembers. “We’re getting this deliverable out—we’re going to go live in February with the new manufacturing and supply chain system.”

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Microsoft and Nokia: An IT integration story

| Microsoft and Nokia: An IT integration story

The triumphant feeling didn’t last long. Around 6 P.M. that day, a company-wide email went out. For a few moments, time stood still as everyone digested the news.

Microsoft had just bought a stake in Finnish telecom giant Nokia, for $7.2 billion.

“Well,” Rogozinski thought as he considered all the work his team had just done, “this project’s dead.”

Closing is coming. Or is it?At that moment, Steve Rogozinski’s supply-chain project may have felt like a lot of effort without a payoff, but the real work—which would come to be known as Project Evergreen—was just beginning.

Project Evergreen was the internal codename for the integration of Microsoft with Nokia—more accurately, the integration of the Nokia Devices and Services (NDS) business, about one-quarter of the venerable phone maker’s overall enterprise. In the deal, five core groups—the smart phone and mobile phone business units, design team, operations and production facilities, and NDS sales and marketing—came over to Microsoft.

In the following months, personnel from both companies dived into a concerted push to close the deal. The original closing date, for planning purposes, was assumed to be January 31, 2014—ambitious for even a routine deal, but a guaranteed pressure cooker for anything of this magnitude.

Nowhere was the pressure felt more than in Microsoft IT and its counterpart at NDS—Information Capabilities Management, known as ICM.

“The stakes were huge,” recalls Tobias Klauder, who was involved in planning the implementation of the deal as the lead of the Microsoft IT venture integration team. “The market was watching, the world was watching, we were making big bets,” Klauder says. “And the need to move quickly was of paramount importance.”

The challenge was formidable: two companies with vastly different cultures, on different continents, in time zones 10 hours apart—making routine meetings more complicated and employees more sleep-deprived.

It would take months of work to make separate network infrastructures compatible, including the need to redo large chunks of the former Nokia network to eliminate IP overlap. Identity access and connectivity had to be provided for thousands of new employees.

Existing dedicated Lync and Exchange instances required a three-way split—some moving to Microsoft.com, others with the “new” Nokia, and still more with the Nokia HERE mapping business (which remained with Nokia and was not part of the transaction). A massive effort was required to ensure that new employees had access to Human Resources (HR) compensation and benefits, despite the complications posed by two

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Announcement Date: September 2, 2013Microsoft announced that they had purchased a stake in Nokia for $7.2 billion.

Original Closing Date: January 31, 2014The original deal closing date was assumed to be January 31, 2014, but was then pushed back while it awaited regulatory approval.

“The market was watching, the world was watching, we were making big bets…”Tobias Klauder,Venture Integration Team,Microsoft IT


separate SAP instances. Teams from both companies were initially limited in the amount of information they could share—yet as they dug deeper, more and more information was uncovered, all of which then had to be vetted for veracity.

Nokia used a lot of Microsoft products, including Office 365. But this was not a case of plug and play—the NDS systems had to be modified and customized, wrappers and APIs developed, and middleware put in place. It wasn’t like two LEGO bricks that just fit together perfectly.

In the beginning, the internal venture integration team devised a structure. It was complex and involved multiple teams, work streams, and lines of reporting.

The structure, from the executive leadership team on down, was designed to bring together integration management team (IMT) leads from both companies. Jeff Wirth came on as the Microsoft IT IMT leader. He was paired with Johan Boije, a veteran of Nokia ICM.

Leading infrastructure and end user productivity on the Microsoft side was John Bartol and on the Nokia side was Fatih Bezirganoglu. Raj Kunnath and Hannu Kankaanpaa led application integration, and in charge of SAP were Hans Goertz and Kaj Nilsson.

About 500 people participated in the integration teams over the next 18 months. A core team of about 60 people worked across the program from start to finish.

“Of the larger group—about 400 in the beginning—only a few people had merger and acquisition experience,” says Sue Gray, who became the primary contact for HR solutions and worked with Susanna Vasara on the Nokia side. “One of the most important lessons these veterans tried to impart was that everything was going to change, a lot, so just roll with it.”

“You have to be able to just say, ‘OK, I’m going to tell you something right now, and as soon as I’m done telling you, it’s probably going to have changed, and that’s OK’,” Gray states. “So we would put a plan together and communicate it out, and we’d revise it and communicate it out, and we’d revise it and communicate it out.”

The structure held the integration together, but there was inevitable confusion early on. Without the regulatory approvals to allow the deal to close, only a limited amount of information could be shared between companies—yet to achieve a deal, they needed all the information they could get.

“I think definitely at first we were wondering what do we do,” remembers Josh Bailey, who came from the integrated supply chain team and represented Corporate Functions IT—including finance, HR, and legal affairs matters—in the integration. “The biggest piece was that we didn’t know for certain when the deal was going to close.”

The fact that Microsoft was acquiring only part of Nokia further complicated matters.

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Microsoft acquired only part of Nokia, the Devices and Services division.This resulted in further complications during the IT integration.


Says Bailey: “We had to basically dissect their existing businesses while they continued to manufacture and put out millions of phones. So it was like operating on a live patient. We had to review, understand, and try to learn their inventory of assets and tools and IT systems, and then help them, without knowing a whole lot.”

Complexities and complicationsThe closing was perhaps the most elusive and malleable facet of the entire integration. The January 31, 2014, date was merely a target. As Christmas came and went and the new year arrived, however, it became obvious that there was simply too much complexity.

“The shifts in dates are really related to regulatory approval,” Tobias Klauder states, “the (tax) issues we had in India, the (regulatory) issues we had in China, keeping some countries and legal entities out of the deal, and the team having to deal with how we carve those things out at the last minute.”

In addition to the regulatory issues, there was a Transition Services Agreement with 67 different statements of work (SOWs). These are legal documents that specify which services one company will provide the other, and for what period of time, either while the deal is working or after it has closed. (IT owned 18 SOWs, and still had four open as of May 2015.)

Ultimately, closing was pushed back to April 24, with Day One following on April 28, 2014.

For John Bartol’s infrastructure group, that delay was a double-edged sword. They had more time to accomplish what they needed, but the extra time also provided executives the opportunity to suggest extra work.

“Our challenge,” Bartol says, “wasn’t just that we were in the critical path for the date to close. There were some elements that both companies clearly wanted lined up before the deal closed. The challenge was more along the lines of, what can you do in a self-contained and quality manner that will actually aid people on Day One?

“Can you get everybody on the same email? Can you get everybody working in at least federated Lync clients? Can you get everybody a blue badge (a Microsoft identity card for full-time employees)?”

Day One finally arrivesAs it turned out, they could.

“If you talk to the integration leadership team,” Wirth recalls, “I would think in general they would tell you that what we did with Day One was unprecedented from a Microsoft perspective in terms of what we’ve done with other deals and that it went really well.”

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Closing Date: April 24, 2014The original deal closing date was assumed to be January 31, 2014, but was then pushed back due to regulatory approval.

Day One: April 28, 2014Official Day One was the Monday following deal close.

“…what we did with Day One was unprecedented from a Microsoft perspective in terms of what we’ve done with other deals…”Jeff Wirth,Integration Management Team,Microsoft IT


As the deal closed on April 24, teams manned “war rooms”—crisis centers staffed with key personnel trained to respond to major problems—and braced all weekend for worst-case scenarios. Other than minor complications, barely a discouraging word was heard.

Working collaboratively over eight months, Microsoft IT and the former Nokia ICM:

Created Microsoft identities and email addresses for more than 30,000 new employees.

Enabled Lync and Yammer social networking access for those employees.

Granted virtual private network (VPN) access to the Nokia ICM network.

Changed hundreds of line-of-business (LOB) applications on the Nokia ICM side.

Made changes in 400 to 500 LOB applications that either used email in the workflow or authenticated based on an email name.

Enabled about 4,000 equity conversions for stock options despite the fact that transferring employees were on a separate SAP system (where some still remain today).

Relocated 300 transferring employees into Microsoft facilities and gave them a suite of IT services.

Enabled Microsoft visibility into the transferring employees’ address book.

On April 28, Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop walked to the stage in Espoo (pronounced “Ess-poh,” a city near Helsinki, Finland) and introduced a video from Satya Nadella.

“Today is a pivotal moment in Microsoft history, as we welcome Nokia Devices and Services to the Microsoft family,” Nadella announced. In 256 words, the new Microsoft CEO made the union between the companies official.

The work is far from doneWith April 28 come and gone, the integration teams could catch their breath. For a few minutes, anyway.

“We pulled off a miracle,” Tobias Klauder declares, and few will argue with him. But there was no time to bask in the glow of accomplishment—it was back to work.

Collaboration Days—the next phase of Project Evergreen—had arrived, and with it, even more herculean tasks, as well as major changes in organization, structure, and accountability across Microsoft IT.

Jason Reiner owns engineering services within Enterprise Infrastructure Services. For him and his teams, “post-Day One is when we really had to dig in,” he remembers. “This is where we got into each individual facility, we started flying people all over the world to sit down, do an analysis, and break down what are you doing, why are you doing it, what’s the hardware you’ve got, and what does your architecture look like, and start doing all the real heavy lifting.”

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“Today is a pivotal moment in Microsoft history, as we welcome Nokia Devices and Services to the Microsoft family.”Satya Nadella,Chief Executive Officer,Microsoft

Collaboration DaysThe period after Day One during which the following tasks and projects were to be completed:

A bidirectional contacts search in Lync and the Microsoft global address book

Outlook calendar visibility for colleagues and for booking Microsoft site conference rooms

Ability of legacy Microsoft employees to add transferred employees to email distribution lists using IDWeb, the internal identity management system

Email permissions using Rights Management Services

Document sharing Availability of SharePoint Online,

OneDrive for Business, and My Sites for transferred employees

Ability to share business data, OneNote notebooks, and more

Work Smart guides and training program

Microsoft software availability from the Application Catalog

Microsoft corporate network access for transferred employees


Doug Pierson is a program manager in the Microsoft IT User Experience Services, specializing in integration projects.

“Collaboration Days,” he says, “was originally supposed to be like a day, and then it turned into a week, and then it turned into waves, and then really the waves themselves were scoped to include even further work. Although a bulk of the work for Collaboration Days took place in FY15, there are lasting pieces of work we’ll be landing in the normal day-to-day work in FY16.”

Pushing forwardAs the summer of 2014 faded, the workload only intensified for the IT teams. Microsoft Day was coming.

“Fall,” John Bartol states, “was just cruel.”

Microsoft Day was a deadline that did not move, unlike its Day One predecessor, adding further pressure. Microsoft Day was going to begin January 1, 2015, and it was expected that the vast majority of transferring employees would be participating. That meant compressed timelines and a lower margin for error.

“It became a unique effort,” Doug Pierson says, “just because the scope of this project was massive. People were engaged through the Microsoft Day integration piece, and we had hundreds of people spread out around the world, helping to do the integration of people—and that’s the most important part of the work stream.”

Forty-seven countries experienced Microsoft Day and its system cutover on January 1, 2015. Fifty-one sites were added to the Microsoft portfolio. Wireless CorpNet was deployed at about 70 former Nokia sites and Nokia wireless at about 70 Microsoft sites. There were approximately 1,100 legacy Microsoft employee moves.

About 22,000 employee records and 10,000 contingent staff records from about 80 legal entities were migrated to the internal enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. Microsoft distributed 17,559 badges and nearly 12,000 smartcard readers to 116 sites worldwide. Internet Explorer 11 was deployed on about 9,000 devices, wireless certificates deployed to nearly 24,000 devices, and the My Microsoft IT app to around 22,000 devices.

One hundred twenty-eight applications for cross-network access were enabled, with more applications being processed. An application plan of record was created to rationalize about 675 IT assets (applications, platforms, and services). About 10,500 open and active purchase orders were migrated. To accommodate the necessary brand transition, 586 unique IT applications were identified and rebranded.

Cultural differences, similaritiesThe members of the IT integration team were learning plenty about their counterparts in NDS—who in turn had their own learning curve with the U.S. and Microsoft headquarters-centric culture.

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Microsoft Day: January 1, 2015The day on which 47 countries would experience the system cutover including:

Wireless CorpNet deployment at 70 former Nokia locations

Nokia Wireless deployment at 70 Microsoft sites

Roughly 1,100 legacy Microsoft employee moves

Migration of 32,000 staff records from 80 legal entities

Distribution of 17,559 badges and 12,000 smartcard readers to 116 sites worldwide

Deployment of Internet Explorer 11 on 9,000 devices

Deployment of wireless certificates to 24,000 devices


A plethora of fun facts about Nokia and Finnish history was compiled into a handy guide, “Finland Cultural Overview,” which Microsoft personnel put together in December 2013 to help employees better understand their soon-to-be colleagues.

It provided some insight into the people (sisu is the Finnish term for inner strength, courage, and determination; the average Finn is honest, straightforward, and thoughtful in conversation), the weather (winter is long, cold, and snowy), and etiquette (be punctual when invited for dinner, and remember your table manners).

Throughout the integration process, Tobias Klauder recalls, the transferring Nokia employees “worked tirelessly. They’re a fantastic group of people who joined Microsoft IT as the ICM integration moved on. The team that joined Microsoft IT has been battle tested and has learned a lot of lessons.”

From the ICM perspective, Johan Boije says, “I’m sure there were many cultural differences that stood out in the beginning. I think we’ve come to realize that cultural differences do exist, but they are maybe not as great as they seemed on that first day.”

Cornelis Van Der Brugge is a former ICM employee who leads Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) site operations for User Experience Services IT.

“My experience,” he remembers, “was that people from Microsoft and Nokia collaborated very well. There are cultural differences, but we were made aware of those in an early stage. The most important thing with cultural differences is that you are aware of them, and you know what to expect and what to do about them.”

Lessons learnedSo what did those involved in the integration process glean from it?

“On the practical side,” says Doug Pierson, “we learned how to deal with huge deals, with deals that involved several hundred sites globally and thousands of people. One of the biggest learnings was how to re-gear toward a deal of that scope and scale. Another was how to effectively staff, man, and operate a war room.”

“Clarifying roles and responsibilities—and doing it earlier in the process—is another lesson that will pay off in future deals,” Jason Reiner states. “Be properly aligned internally and keep messaging consistent, so everyone is clear on who owns which work.”

Adds Josh Bailey, “I think one of the most important learnings was to take the time to learn. In some ways we got too many people involved too quickly before we knew what we were doing. Don’t try to do it before you’ve learned.”

“The right structure, especially from the beginning, sets the tone for everything that follows. And that starts at the top,” Bailey says. “The executives were very supportive throughout the entire process. We

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didn’t allow organizational boundaries or lack of resources to prevent us from getting stuff done.”

“It was a tough deal,” Raj Kunnath remembers, “but having the right team, and the right team structure, helped us. And the leadership commitment on this was amazing, because they actually empowered the right people in the right roles.”

For Fatih Bezirganoglu, it’s about trust: “When that trust is built early in the process, it instills the belief that regardless of what challenges may arise, they can be resolved by working together.”

With trust, of course, comes belief, Steve Rogozinski says: “It’s easier to get people to do something if you believe in them and give them a chance to do it. I think we gave everybody a chance.”

“I think what I took away from it,” says Sue Gray, “was if you’re able to step back and look at a problem and understand it, it’s astounding what you can complete.”

For Cornelis Van Der Brugge, the importance of proactivity was not to be underestimated. “Be active in finding your counterparts, and start collaborating,” he states. “Reach out to people. Don’t wait for people to come to you. Go find out who you need to work with.”

Beyond the increased business acumen, beyond the boost in technical skills, beyond the strategic advantages to bringing the two entities together, there’s also the human factor—something that should never be underestimated.

“First of all,” Bezirganoglu says, “we always had fun. Even when there was a crisis, we were laughing still. The relaxed environment really helped us to manage all those crises well.”

Looking back, and forwardProject Evergreen has ceased to exist as a formal project. Most of the integration teams have gone back to their regular jobs, although the work continues. John Bartol says several key integration members will stay embedded for at least the rest of 2015.

Jason Reiner and his teams are still building engineering infrastructure and preparing for the launch of Windows 10. Networking conflicts remain to be resolved. Facilities are being revamped globally. There is work to be done surrounding application portfolios. Tasks that were directed to Project Evergreen are being incorporated into everyday IT work streams. Integration funding and management are no longer centralized, but spread around Microsoft IT.

“The process may have been long, trying, and complex,” Cornelis Van Der Brugge recalls, “but in the end it shows that keeping an open mind to new experiences and focusing forward increases the chance of a successful outcome.”

“It is difficult to let go,” he says. “People need to let go of what they’ve been doing earlier and think about the One Microsoft targets. What I’ve

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“…if you’re able to step back and look at a problem and understand it, it’s astounding what you can complete.”Sue Gray,Human Resouces,Microsoft IT


been telling my people all the time is that it gives you the best feeling afterward if you just collaborate in a positive way and not try to keep a hold of old things or be nostalgic about old solutions. It’s best for everybody if you just work positively toward the goal.”

“It was a lot of work,” Josh Bailey remembers, “a lot of good laughs. Good friendships were built, a lot of amazing experiences. And in the end we stayed true to our principles and executed what we needed to get done.”

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