Challenge
A leading cloud-based software provider taps the power of big data to help companies around the globe optimize their pricing, sales, and revenue so they can deliver the best price to their customers while boosting efficiency and maximizing profits for their investors.
Because the company’s software is hosted in the cloud, its two data centers are pivotal to delivering fast, effective pricing services to industries like hospitality, airlines, healthcare, automobiles, and many more.
The company faced three major challenges:
- Business: From a business perspective, the company needed to cut costs by reducing the footprint of its two data centers. It also had to deal with high turnover in its IT staff.
- Tech: From a technology perspective, the company had to figure out what to do with an aging, high-cost legacy storage system that was nearing the end of its useful life. It was also running out of storage space in its data centers.
- Risk: From a risk perspective, the company was looking at a substantial investment to expand the capacity of its two data centers — so it had to make the optimum technology choices for its unique needs.
Solution
OBJECTIVES: The cloud software provider had to get two things right:
- Map out its IT needs. The company had a dozen racks of outdated legacy hardware in its data centers, which need to be extremely fast and flexible to provide real-time pricing guidance to the company’s clients, especially in the airline industry. With the technology landscape changing so rapidly, the company needed a trusted consulting partner to help it sort through all of its options and get a clear picture of the potential costs, benefits, and risks of an upgrade.
- Address IT staffing issues. The company is headquartered in a city dominated by a much larger industry that offers higher pay scales. That makes it difficult to keep key IT people, who are constantly being poached by the company’s well-heeled neighbors. Furthermore, in a rapidly changing IT environment, the company needed to be assured of having highly trained, certified people with substantial IT experience on hand to handle the upgrade of their data center.
SOLUTION: OnX provided a comprehensive solution that helped the cloud software provider in three key areas:
- Consulting: OnX worked with the company for several months to get a holistic, big-picture view of their existing hardware, software, IT staff, and client base. OnX assessed the company’s service level agreements, software packages, networking capacity, and many more factors before making any recommendations for new technologies. OnX also helped the company sort out the legalities involved in upgrading their data centers.
- Hardware and Software: The company already had a relationship with Cisco Systems. OnX helped them expand on that by developing a standardized infrastructure though Cisco’s SmartStack™, which integrates top-of-the-line Cisco server, switch and router technology with fast, flexible, scalable storage technology from Nimble Storage. In addition, we helped them negotiate their VMware Enterprise License Agreement.
- Professional Services: Through the OnX OnDemand Residency Services program, OnX provided certified, highly trained IT personnel to fill in gaps where the company lacked critical expertise. In addition, we offered block time to provide ongoing support.
Results
Partnering with OnX pays off in six key ways for the cloud software provider:
- New data center technology helps the company add new customers much more rapidly, allowing them to set more ambitious growth targets.
- The standardized SmartStack data center architecture streamlines IT management and made it quicker and easier to add capacity as the company grows.
- A smaller data center footprint saved money on power, cooling, and maintenance.
- The latest storage technology provided more data capacity in less space.
- Having a trusted technology partner who understood their entire IT environment made it easier to settle complicated tech issues that cropped up.
- The company now has access to highly trained IT people who can ease the strain of employee turnover.