Marcel Klein, Chief Technology Officer, Ayvens

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Marcel Klein, Chief Technology Officer, Ayvens

Leading tech transformation across territories

Marcel Klein’s passion for IT is clear. His career started with a 10-year stint at Lidl, which saw him rise through the ranks from IT support to his first leadership role, and he’s since brought his extensive expertise and leadership experience to Café Nero, Amazon Retail, AWS and latterly LeasePlan, now Ayvens which is part of the Société Generale Group.

From defining the technology roadmap and the team’s operating model to running three significant programmes concurrently, Marcel shares the standout moments of his time at Ayvens so far.

Stepping up to CTO

Marcel joined LeasePlan in 2020 during the first COVID-19 lockdown, a year that will stand out in many tech leaders’ minds as a time when teams needed to pull together to deliver the ability to remote work, quickly.

He brought with him a wealth of experience and came direct from AWS, where he was a global launch manager for new regions. That role saw him directing programmes end-to-end for launching new data centres – from finding sites and getting permits through to working with architects and engineers to build the data centre and network and services teams to getting it up and running. A big success during Marce’s time there was launching AWS Sweden after just a 24-month programme.

Prior to AWS, Marcel was delivering sort centres and non-robotics warehouses for Amazon Retail across the globe, sometimes running 55 projects concurrently across different time zones.

At LeasePlan, he first stepped into the role of Head of Hosting and Network, which included end user computing, networks, cloud hosting and security. After LeasePlan was acquired by ALD Automotive, a subsidiary of the French Société Generale Group group, the combined company name was launched as Ayvens shortly after Marcel was named CTO in September 2023.

Helping 10,000 people to work from home

Marcel shares that starting a new role during a lockdown came with its challenges, but needing to deliver significant change, fast, gave him great focus.

He continues, “Lockdown was a testing time for everybody mentally, but also from a technical perspective it was testing because we weren’t really built to work from home.”

“At that time at LeasePlan, most people had desk phones and desktop computers and we were doing everything by email rather than Teams or similar. So, the first couple of months were hectic while getting everybody ready to work from home.”

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For the team, that meant buying laptops and getting them set up with the necessary security, plus installing Teams over a weekend for 10,000 people.

Marcel remembers, “Getting a company that wasn't able to work from home, ready to work from home was quite a challenge, but also at that time, the digital leadership had secured significant investment for a full reinstall of all infrastructure and to build the next gen. applications for leasing.”

This meant the team were handling network, end-user computing and cloud projects in the same period.

A time of big change

Marcel recalls, “There was a startup vibe going on in terms of building fast and failing fast. We were seeing what the new landscape of an application looks like and building it all in the cloud. And we had to get ready from an infrastructure perspective for that at the same time.”

A further consideration was that LeasePlan had a banking license and had been governed by the central bank of the Netherlands, DNB, but they’d just reached a valuation threshold of over a billion Euros, so they were now to be governed by the European Central Bank (ECB). This meant everything the team was building had to be ECB compliant, demanding a next level of scrutiny and standards.

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Marcel shares what the team was working on at this time, “We were rebuilding the whole infrastructure and rolling out laptops to 10,000 people, but we wanted to make sure that it was future-proof. If a laptop broke, we didn’t want somebody to have to come into the office to have it replaced. We wanted it to be fairly intuitive while also being secure, so we could send out laptops and people could set these up themselves.”

Marcel continues, “We figured out an operating model around this in terms of how that would work. We were very federated within the countries in terms of IT, but we took that in centrally to within the core infrastructure team.

“We did the same for the networking side. We had very old MPLS networks, which were point-to-point networks between the open data centre and the offices. We put in a modern SD WAN that we could flex up and flex down bandwidth as people were using Teams more.”

But that wasn’t all. They also decided to build a network intelligence platform around this to enable automation and be able to patch quicker due to the increased security risk of people working from home creating a need for extra security layers.

Marcel explains, “We also knew that the applications team were looking to go onto the cloud. To be able to move fast, we then decided to build a cloud landing zone based on AWS.”

That was brand new for LeasePlan, so they built up a cloud team within infrastructure and started building a landing zone that the applications teams could build on quickly – again to ECB standards and security.

Marcel notes, “We built it to be very cutting edge. AWS did an audit on us not long ago, obviously that's not independently verified, but according to that we were in the top 5% of companies who were using AWS to its max.”

Building a team to build the programmes

While previously a lot of infrastructure had been outsourced, the decision was made to insource and scale up the internal team. Marcel explains, “When I joined, there was me and six permanent people. Now there’s me and 180 people who are distributed across four locations from Dublin to Amsterdam and Bucharest, plus a small group in the UK.”

It was an exciting time in terms of what they were achieving together. Marcel shares, “Everybody was working towards this common cool goal of reinstalling the infrastructure. Productivity in the team was sky high because everybody was enjoying working on new tech and interesting projects alongside their BAU.

“We were doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff, so that really motivated people and they went the extra mile.”

Hitting barriers during transformation

Legacy systems can cause challenges during digital transformations, but some things thankfully were relatively simple, including networking end user computing: “It was easy because we just moved to the next layer –  from desktops to laptops, from MPLS from point to point to SD Wan. We replaced the legacy items.”

Where things become a little more difficult was the servers while building up the cloud.

Marcel explains, “Moving workloads from data centre to the cloud is usually relatively easy, but while our servers are a recent model, the application which runs on them has origins from 40 years ago from a coding perspective.

“Of course, the technology works perfectly well for what we do but, because of the code, we went down the path of emulating it on the cloud in AWS.

“We did this with a few PLCs, but the emulators weren't quite at the level that they needed to be. So now, the leasing platform remains the same while the boxes infrastructure is newer. The leasing software will be replaced with the new applications that we're building in the cloud, so we will migrate to that in time.”

Following the road map

All of these projects fit the roadmap that Marcel begun developing in his first role within LeasePlan. Security has always been a key part of the roadmap because of the need to conform to ECB standards – and this became even more important when the company needed to have the flexibility to be able to work from anywhere.

But there were also three other segments within this roadmap. Marcel explains, “We decided to work on network, end-user computing and moving to cloud programmes at the same time, so you have to cook the interdependency between them all – they work best together, but they can also all work independently.”

Because the network would be the quickest project to roll out, that’s what they did first, connecting 120 offices to the same backbone. We wanted to know how simple that actually was?

Marcel shares, “While it's not simple, it's relatively simple. You only have 120 locations that you need to consider, and you can build that backbone fairly quickly once you pick the right partner.

“In comparison, rolling out laptops to 10,000 users across 29 countries was not as straightforward, especially while some of them were still in COVID lockdown. Plus, sometimes a country has an application installed in a completely different way to the country beside it.”

Marcel names modularity, flexibility, agility as key components, “The idea was to cut out complications. We had good partners that helped us with all those things. Our partners helped us learn how to ‘fish’ as opposed to ‘fishing’ for us, as we wanted to run the platform ourselves.”

A focus on security

As Marcel mentioned earlier, security and compliance became even more critical with a distributed workforce.

While the ECB guidelines clearly state what is necessary, Marcel and the team dedicated time to translating that end point into actionable steps for the business.

He covers what this means, “For example, their guidelines say you have to have encryption, but they don’t state what level of encryption or where. Together with our security team and security specialists, we looked at each requirement and then worked out what that meant for each of the three programmes we wanted to work on.

“So, for the laptop programme, it means we're going to have encryption on the device and multi factor authentication to log into the device and so on. For the network programme, it meant having encryption throughout. And for the cloud programme, we decided it wouldn’t just be a UI, it would be coded.”

“We decided people won’t be able to deploy onto the cloud if they don’t fulfil certain security parameters in terms of being part of a backup, the patching process, encrypting data and so on.

“So, while we’re now developing that platform, we’re putting effort into what does security look like for us to make sure that we’re secure when its deployed, as opposed to having to do remediation.”

“We don't want to have a big team of compliance and governance people that have to check if each country is compliant and try to help them remediate it. We want to put the horse before the cart.”

Supporting people through change

With so much happening at once, supporting non-tech teams has been of real importance. A change and adoption team has been key to this.

Marcel tells us how the two teams are collaborating to make the transition smoother for the wider workforce, “For example, on the end user computing side of things, we were very keen to have the change and adoption team in from the start.

“During the entire development process, they would catch up on a regular basis with the laptop development teams to make sure that if the dev team had made a change, the change team’s documentation was updated at that time too.

“They also built documentation for the laptop programme to explain the reason for multi-factor authentication and so on – which is to be compliant with ECB standards.”

“The change and adoption team rightly queried everything, including what happens if a laptop breaks or if support is needed. We’d decided to set up kiosks in our offices so that people can visit them in person to get support, and we also had a central support desk.”

Changing methodology

The non-tech team aren’t the only ones actively adapting. Marcel had been used to using PMP, PMI, PRINCE2 and Waterfall project management methodologies, which were right for the necessary strict sequence of events that come with building a data centres. But because of the different type of programme at Ayvens, different methodologies were in use – they were building agile and doing scrum.

Marcel expands on this, “We implemented the agile way of working into an infrastructure team which usually would only be used for software teams, but it worked really, really well.

“We made sure that every team was part of the new way of working too, so they did their PI (Progam Increment) planning of events and so on at the same time, so the interaction between the teams and the interdependencies between the teams are addressed as they're planning their work.”

As well as running all projects in this agile way, they recognised that they could use that same approach to run BAU.

“Now we have PI planning events every couple of months, where people plan out their next three months of work, obviously leaving a little bit of space for flexibility. It’s worked really well. And we also had a scrum team embedded within all the infrastructure teams.”

Envisioning and embedding an operating model

The operating model was a big focus for Marcel and the team while they were undertaking the three large projects.

They were heading towards a lot of self-service, automation and auto-remediation, “So that if a problem came up, specifically on the network side, our intelligence platform would detect any anomalies.

“Depending on the size of the anomaly it would either auto remediate it itself or isolate that network device, lock it down and raise a ticket so that the network team could look at it.”

It was important to think about what operating model would best fit their expanded team, something decided in consultation with teams in the various countries they operated across.

Communicating the operating models to end users was key here to set clear expectations of what hours they would be available for support.

Plus, they invested time in recategorising the incident severity levels. Marcel points out, “For users, a SEV1 might be not being able to log into their laptop out of normal hours, but it’s not necessarily a SEV1 for the business. While it’s annoying for the user, they can come into the office the following day or contact the team to raise a ticket for them and then we’d phone them to work on the issue.”

Life after acquisition

Another big change during Marcel’s tenure has been the acquisition by Ayvens we mentioned earlier, which was completed in 2023. Integration is ongoing, having begun in 2024 and due to finish this year.

Marcel shares what this has meant for his role, “When I started in LeasePlan, obviously though in a different role, I was very heavily involved in all the technical decisions and the teams were already growing and maturing.

“But with the acquisition my role became more relationship led, because there are counterparts on the ALD Automotive side, so it’s important to start getting to know people, building relationships, understanding their technologies, figuring out the differences and bringing people together.”

Of course, there were technical consideration too. Marcel continues, “From when the planned acquisition of LeasePlan was announced, people wanted to be able to message between LeasePlan and ALD, which you’re not allowed to do from a legal perspective because we were single entities. That meant we had to get legal dispensations to be able to test things.

“There were also questions from our people about whether we’d use LeasePlan technology or ALD technology? We’re actually using neither of those and are opting for Softgen technology instead.”

Plus, as CTO, Marcel was part of the leadership team responsible for creating the new Ayvens culture and considering how to bring the best of both companies together.

Words of encouragement

With so much experience so far in his career, we asked Marcel what advice he would give to other CTOs navigating large-scale digital transformations – especially in industries with legacy systems and regulatory constraints?

Marcel first points out, “I don't actually see them as constraints, I see them a foundational level that people are implementing for the wider good that you can embrace. I think we’re probably most creative when we have constraints, it makes you think about the problem a little bit differently and can help different teams look at the constraint from different angles and work together.”

In terms of large-scale digital transformations, he again encourages people to choose to embrace them head on, “If you get the chance to be part of digital transformation, most of the time that change is good.

“I'm very aware of how privileged I was to do so many transformations at the same time. Most companies don’t do these projects in parallel, they do them in a sequence with some slight overlaps.”

While Marcel enjoyed being part of four or five different projects at the same time and having to think about how they all work together, he recognises that's not necessarily going to be the same everybody but, the benefit is, those transformations are really interesting.

Another thing he mentions, “While we are techie nerds, don't forget the human element.

“And take the opportunity to look at the problem in a different way, because sometimes the way you've always done things isn't the way it should always be done. Be open to that challenge.”

In terms of legacy systems, he suggests, “Don't be scared of them. Try something new, like we tried to go down the emulator route with our servers for our cloud programme. Ultimately it didn't work, the emulators weren't at the right level, so we had to keep the legacy systems for another while, but we’re on that trajectory.”

Marcel explains the mindset that’s helped him see growth in his career, “I see everything that I do as a learning opportunity. Sometimes people have other opinions, and you need to learn from those. Don’t let yourself be stifled and don't always think you're right, because nobody is always right!”

Which takes us back to the point Marcel made earlier about having the opportunity to build fast and fail fast. There’s clearly more successful building than failing in Marcel’s career, and we for one can’t wait to see what he does next.