About IIS

IIS spearheaded a major server consolidation for the leading seller of online business services, migrating the system from 40 servers to three HP Superdomes. IIS helped negotiate flexible financing that reduced the consolidation costs and got the project completed in an amazing 90 days. Now the client can leverage the latest technical advances to speed data processing and increase storage while reducing their data center expenses.

IIS has worked for six years with a leading seller of online business services that had been a longtime user of HP hardware products. In 2001 IIS began the first phase of a major server consolidation effort because the system running all the core business applications for the client's largest e-commerce division had ballooned to almost 40 servers. They included the e-commerce applications directly generating revenue, the business intelligence warehouses, the data bases that allowed the purchasing department to cut purchase orders, manufacturing apps, sales force automations that used Siebold for sales projections and quotas and the SAP programs that ran their invoicing systems. The result was increasing instances of overlapping functionality.

In the beginning of 2005, when their latest equipment lease period was coming to its end, IIS moved the client another step forward in the consolidation process. It was the ideal time for IIS to evaluate the next generation of business needs and demonstrate that the flexible financing they could negotiate with HP for a new platform offering further consolidation reduced the costs when compared to maintaining the existing servers past the warranty period.

There were multiple considerations. The client could:

• leverage the latest technical advances to enjoy faster, more efficient storage and data processing
• consolidate servers further to reduce expenses
• lease cutting-edge hardware at a highly favorable price
• insure sufficient capacity for projected business needs
• avoid maintenance costs now they were past the lease warranty period

IIS achieved considerable savings for the client through the architecture of the server partitioning, and took on the challenge of configuring three large HP Superdome servers in just 90 days. A phenomenal amount of work was done between April 2005 and July 2005 to achieve a successful migration and rehost these applications on the new platform.

Since the critical e-commerce business applications were the heart of the migration, in other hands it would be a high-risk process since a deployment failure would literally put the client out of business. One of the hallmarks of IIS is its attention to the planning process, it is through the pre-production work that the client can be given the assurance that these applications will run perfectly on the new platform and that there was a good backout plan to roll applications to another server if necessary.

A further challenge came in the timing restrictions, the scheduling of the production work for the core apps could only happen overnight and on weekends, in the off hours. Partitioning of the less critical servers, such as those handling development and Quality Assurance (QA) could be done during regular business hours.

"All Superdome partitions have been successfully moved to the new hardware we recently acquired through negotiations with HP and IIS with no unscheduled outages to the businesses."

Reducing IT expenses while increasing efficiency and capacity.

The result was that the client could move its entire division to three high performance HP Superdomes with a seamless migration effected by IIS in just 90 days. It was another example of IIS doing whatever it took to get the job done.

There were marked efficiencies beyond just the leasing cost of the new platform hardware compared to the cost of maintaining the older collection of smaller servers. It now took fewer people to manage just three systems and less time to process jobs, increased performance saved on personnel costs. With the escalating expenses of running modern data centers, the use of floor space was greatly reduced, so the client was saving substantially going forward by reducing the equipment footprint.

Change within an organization is always problematic. IIS understands the dynamics of change management at every level and is sensitive to the costs. It takes a considerable investment of not just money but client personnel to upgrade the system architecture. Clients appreciate that when IIS puts people on site they are able to work capably with the technical personnel and the business owners to minimize the internal man hours needed to run a project.

"The migration is a great success story...IIS should be congratulated for an outstanding and successful job."

Achieving the impossible over and over again, on time and on budget.

Besides managing large, enterprise-wide projects, IIS works closely throughout the year with the client's internal IT staff to offer infrastructure consulting services. Business units regularly need to bring on a stream of new applications and databases and IIS architects their integration into the existing system.

The hallmark of IIS is customer service, and one recent project demonstrates the level of responsiveness clients receive from every member of the IIS team. In 2006 there was a sudden rate change instituted by the United States Postal Service that would affect every customer in one e-commerce division. There hadn't been a change in more than three years and by the time the client reached out to IIS there wasn't even enough time to lease the equipment needed to accommodate the urgent need for increased capacity on a temporary basis.

"At every turn IIS demonstrated intense levels of responsiveness."

The client was in desperate need for an additional HP Superdome server for the three weeks it would take to ramp up to the critical 24-hour period when the rates would change. Every customer in this e-Commerce division had to call into the system at virtually time same time and the applications and the hardware had to accommodate an intense surge of activity.

The IIS attitude is always, "make it happen" and they proved themselves to be nimble in meeting the client's needs. They loaned hardware to the client's Atlanta data center and coordinated the delivery and installation with HP while responding to myriad last minute changes at all hours of the day and night.

Successful deployment of the emergency equipment during the postal rate change was essential to our client's business survival and dramatically impacted the ability of each of their customers to conduct their business. This was truly mission-critical technology. The level of trust that exists between IIS and its clients is demonstrated by the fact that IIS set out to meet this challenge without even a purchase order. Their focus was on getting the job done, no matter what it took.

"IIS comes through with flying colors every time, the staff is just crackerjack and we know we can always count on them."

IIS succeeds through its can-do attitude, its nimble technical teams who can jump right into a challenge, and its great rapport with the client. They become part of the client organization during an engagement and are able to understand both the long-term and the short-term goals from the client perspective and how to add value.