Middleby innovates, manufactures and markets its products worldwide to provide customers with the most advanced industry solutions for commercial foodservice, food processing and residential kitchens. With over 10,000 employees and hundreds of subsidiaries, Middleby is experiencing rapid growth backed by tech-driven solutions.
One of Middleby’s growth strategies is to acquire companies that drive strategic value for their customers. As an efficiently-run organization, the Middleby IT team consolidates all Microsoft 365 tenants within subsidiaries they acquire into a unified environment, which is ideal from a governance perspective but could present challenges if not architected correctly.
Their central IT team needed to provide their subsidiary’s administrators with a method to easily access their respective user information and perform day-to-day Microsoft 365 administrative tasks. In some cases, these are the admins who were managing Microsoft 365 for the acquired companies and they are used to far more autonomy, especially since they understand their users and systems better than a centralized team could. Out-of-the-box Microsoft tenant management capabilities made it impossible for the central IT team to do what they knew was best for the business.
CoreView truly is a powerful tool. There's so much more beyond segmentation. I don't think we really knew at the time what we need or want, but now that we're there, I couldn't live without workflows and segmentations, among other features.
Middleby’s IT team evaluated tenant segmentation options, and landed on CoreView for two key reasons: Virtual Tenants™ and Perfect Permissions™.
With these two capabilities, CoreView created over 80 “slices” of their single Microsoft 365 tenant, providing granular controls for Middleby’s central IT team to manage each subsidiary as required.
These capabilities give regional admins more autonomy, enabling efficiency without the risk of giving too much access to distributed teams. The IT organization also benefits from automated reporting, improving visibility across the entire Microsoft 365 environment. Best of all, the central IT admins can avoid bottlenecks by distributing workloads, while maintaining security.
Working closely with Middleby, CoreView built out over 80 Virtual Tenants to separate each of their subsidiaries into their own virtualized Microsoft 365 tenant. Coupled with automated workflows, the autonomy provided through Perfect Permissions and Virtual Tenants has empowered admins to perform upwards of 250 workflows and 31,000 management actions over the course of just seven months.
In addition to creating more efficiency for their IT team, CoreView’s activity reporting helped Middleby save almost $200K within their Microsoft 365 environment.
“CoreView truly is a powerful tool. There’s so much more beyond segmentation. I don’t think we really knew at the time what we would need or want,” said Michael Labate, director of IT for The Middleby Corp, “but now that we’re there, I couldn’t live without workflows and segmentations, among other features.” Middleby continues to partner with CoreView in monthly workshops and regular meetings to refine usage, gain expertise and get the most out of their Microsoft 365 environment.