The health insurer thought it had about 1,000 devices to move. There was a new data center in Virginia, an old facility in Georgia, and four months to get the job done. Then Align counted the equipment. The actual number was 3,571. Imagine booking a moving van and discovering, on inspection, that your house has two extra floors.
- Align builds and moves technology infrastructure, then helps operate it.
- Its managed IT business focuses on investment firms and their service providers.
- The useful lesson: verify the inventory before trusting the plan.
That insurer’s migration, described in a 2020 case study, is a useful introduction to Align. The company’s work begins where a neat strategy encounters an untidy room full of machines. It organized the move into nine waves, with assigned bundles and named leads for disconnecting and reconnecting equipment. Align reports completing the move within four months and reducing the data center footprint by 40%.
First, find the missing forty
Founded in 1986 by Jim Dooling, Align sells assessment, design, construction, migration and ongoing IT operations. Dooling majored in architecture at Miami University in Ohio. There is an appealing continuity here: rooms, connections, dependencies, the consequences of putting something in the wrong place. His company works on the physical and operational arrangements that make digital businesses possible.
The inventory problem was hardly confined to that insurer. At a regional bank, Align used partner Device42’s discovery tools to examine systems with inadequate documentation. The bank’s team had forecast 58 applications. Discovery found another 40. Before deciding what belonged in the cloud, somebody needed to establish what belonged in the bank.
Align’s own Asset Point software tackles the related problem of keeping infrastructure legible. It records hardware, physical infrastructure and capacity information, supporting migration planning and continuing operations. The software sits alongside consulting and engineering. That combination matters: a database can store an equipment record; a migration team still has to validate it and decide what happens next.
The first obstacle was paperwork
At Staten Island University Hospital, part of Northwell Health, the difficult early discovery concerned software licenses. There was no central repository of license status. Some applications had expired software, and getting replacement quotes through application owners added several weeks to future-state design. Limited visibility into other Northwell initiatives also complicated consolidation planning.
Align worked with application owners, vendors and Northwell specialists to define destinations, upgrades, testing and rollback procedures. The resulting program covered 123 applications. Here, the first documented schedule snag was administrative. Buying newer hardware would not, by itself, have supplied the missing licensing information.
Before deciding what belonged in the cloud, somebody needed to establish what belonged in the bank.
THE INVENTORY PROBLEM
The practical borrowing is straightforward: give every application an owner, record its dependencies, check its licenses and agree on a recovery plan. This requires cooperation across teams. A discovery tool cannot compel a vendor to respond or an application owner to make a decision. The method becomes harder when those people are unavailable, or when a deadline leaves no room for validation.
The lease sets the clock
For construction company DPR, a pending Arizona data center lease renewal accelerated an existing plan to move applications to Microsoft Azure. Align assessed workloads, designed the destination and used Azure migration tools. Its 2019 account describes moving more than 300 servers supporting 80 applications, consolidating over 400 databases and transferring more than 200 terabytes of data.
The project took less than five months. Align estimated approximately $3 million in total-cost-of-ownership savings over five years, alongside eliminating the data center footprint. That distinction deserves attention: a forecast across five years has a different meaning from cash saved on moving day. For a buyer, the comparison should include implementation, continuing cloud consumption, support and the facilities costs being retired.
DPR’s reported total-cost-of-ownership savings. A projection over time, with a specific customer’s starting point.
Then somebody answers the ticket
Align’s market has two clear centers. Professional services serve data center infrastructure projects. Managed services concentrate on hedge funds, private equity firms, registered investment advisers, family offices and related businesses. The Align IT Suite combines cloud, cybersecurity and daily operations; Align Guardian provides managed detection and response with round-the-clock security operations support.
The business model follows the work: scoped projects, continuing managed-service relationships and SaaS through Asset Point. Workplace services add networking, audiovisual systems and cabling. Microsoft is a central technology partner. A customer can buy expertise for a change event, continuing operational responsibility, or a combination of the two.
For buyers comparing an internal team, a specialist provider or several contractors, Align’s distinction is the span of those responsibilities, coupled with its investment-industry focus. The sensible test is concrete: who owns the handoff, what support hours apply, and which decisions remain with the customer? A small firm needing occasional laptop repairs should examine whether that service scope fits its needs.
Even the floor plan gets a robot
One of Align’s more revealing partnerships is with Dusty Robotics. Data center floor layouts require precise lines for equipment placement. In a February 2025 case study, Align described using automated layout on a project totaling 2,304 racks across six rooms. It reported saving 784 hours and needing 18 fewer layout crew members.
Precision also changed the response to delayed equipment. The team could install supporting infrastructure before the missing gear arrived. “Without Dusty, we wouldn’t have felt confident about the accuracy,” said David Donato, its data center design and construction director. The robot’s value extended beyond drawing lines: it gave people enough confidence to change the sequence of work.
That is a useful way to read Align’s current direction, too. In August 2026 it appointed longtime executive Noel Kilcooley CTO, with oversight including AI, cybersecurity and compliance. The technologies change; the recurring task is making dependencies understandable enough to act on. Before the next ambitious transformation, try the unglamorous question that reshaped the insurer’s move: has anybody actually counted?