NRI gives operational efficiency a boost with Mattermost

NRI (Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.) is a global consulting firm that helps organizations around the world adopt modern technologies, like Atlassian products and Mattermost, as part of a broad range of business solutions. With headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, NRI has 13,000 employees across 61 offices located in 14 countries. NRI’s journey to discovering, adopting, and championing Mattermost began with solving its own need for a secure, scalable messaging and collaboration platform.

One of NRI’s technical brands is called aslead, which provides a range of engineering services that focus on DevOps, team management, and knowledge base development. Aslead’s solutions use popular developer tools and services to help customers streamline their team operations and CI/CD workflows. As part of their scope of work, the aslead team also focuses on developing internal solutions to enhance the productivity and efficiency of NRI’s globally distributed employees. 

The search for a solution with compliant data handling

Prior to adopting Mattermost, NRI was using HipChat as its company-wide messaging platform. When Atlassian announced end-of-life plans for HipChat, NRI’s aslead team began looking for a replacement solution. Any new messaging platform needed to maintain compliance with J-SOX regulations and company IT policies that govern data handling. 

The aslead team explored a number of messaging solutions. A few team members had heard about Mattermost, so they included the platform in their evaluation process. After careful review, the team found that Mattermost was the only solution that met NRI’s enterprise requirements. The platform could give NRI’s IT team full ownership and control over their messaging data and deployment. In addition, Mattermost could scale seamlessly to thousands of concurrent users, it was easy to configure for multiple teams, and it offered an enjoyable, Slack-like user experience.

“Mattermost had everything we needed in a messaging platform—security, scalability, and usability—it was the best choice for us.”

— Hiroshi Noto, Engineer, NRI

Migration to Mattermost began with a custom implementation

In two weeks, one engineer implemented and customized Mattermost to meet the needs of NRI’s unique system architecture. The engineer took an unusual approach in that he deployed a Mattermost cluster to the company’s server running on Amazon Web Services using AWS Elastic Container Services (ECS). This setup connected to other AWS services, such as Elastic File System (EFS), Aurora Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Backup, as well as the Elasticsearch service.

Initially, the team rolled out a beta trial of Mattermost to approximately 100 users in one department. After this proved successful, they migrated 1000 users off of one HipChat server to Mattermost. In a final step, the team migrated 6000 users from six HipChat servers over a two month period. Now, the majority of NRIs employees are using Mattermost to communicate with colleagues and business partners around the world.

Mattermost integrations help accelerate workflows

The aslead team was particularly interested in Mattermost’s integration with Atlassian and other DevOps tools to help them accelerate their workflows. Mattermost’s Jira plugin sends Jira ticket updates directly to collaboration channels, so team members can take immediate action. Similarly, the team can also send and configure Confluence notifications from within a channel. The Zoom plugin allows the team to start audio and video Zoom conferences directly in Mattermost. These integrations, along with the Mattermost mobile app, enable easier access to information and collaboration tools for all team members, regardless of their location.

As a result of switching to Mattermost, NRI has been able to improve efficiency across the organization. The platform serves as a searchable central repository of information that gives employees self-service access to the information they need without having to ask for help. When they do need support, posting a message in a dedicated channel in Mattermost results in much faster response times than an email or phone call.

“After migrating to Mattermost, we have reduced the number of meetings needed to collaborate or solve problems.” 

— Hiroshi Noto, Engineer, NRI

NRI offers Mattermost-powered solutions to their own customers

With the success of Mattermost across the global NRI organization, the aslead team saw an opportunity to include the platform in their customer offerings. NRI has since become a valued systems integration partner of Mattermost, working with enterprise customers to deploy, manage, extend, and customize the platform to meet a wide range of business needs. The aslead team packages Mattermost with Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence to deliver their Team Management solution, as well as their upcoming Agile solution. No doubt NRI’s expertise with Mattermost will inspire even more ways to serve their customers in the future.

Japanese speakers can learn more about NRI’s partnership with Mattermost here:

About NRI

Founded in 1965, NRI (Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.) is a leading global provider of system solutions and consulting services, including management consulting, system integration, and IT management and solutions for financial, manufacturing, retail and service industries. Clients partner with NRI to expand businesses, design corporate structures, and create new business strategies. NRI has over 13,000 employees in its offices globally, including New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.