Our Client: Global Publishing and Entertainment Conglomerate

Challenge: With a portfolio of publishing, music and operating companies around the world, our client seeks continuous improvement in all phases of its business. To reduce IT costs and improve service across its North American operations, in 2003 our client established a shared services initiative. This involved centralizing data center operations at our client’s Mid-Atlantic data center and establishing a lights-out disaster recovery center in the Midwest.

The effort of consolidating infrastructure posed a number of business risks for our client. For example, the Mid-Atlantic data center was home to the company’s rapidly growing e-commerce operations. Systems Alliance was engaged to reduce operational risk and ensure the efficient and effective consolidation of its operations.

Solution: Systems Alliance developed a cost model which would permit the re-hosting of a significant number of ERP and other applications on newer, more efficient infrastructure. Working with our partner, Sun Microsystems, our team migrated servers and storage from a three-year old platform to state-of-the-art Solaris-based infrastructure, engineering cost and complexity out of the shared services platform.