Client

A pizza chain founded in 1963 operates (with its franchise partners) more than 175 stores in six states. Additionally, they operate more than 100 kiosks in grocery stores and offer products at 18 entertainment and sports venues.  

Business issue

The CBTS Senior Account Manager, who had previous business contact with the Customer Vice president & CIO through his former position at Oracle, initially introduced their management to our data center services with a tour of a CBTS’ Tier 3 VDC facility in March of 2009.

At the time, another firm handled management of their web site within a competitor data center facility located in the Midwest.

The Customer sought CBTS as its new hosting provider to address and solve the following issues it experienced with its existing hosting provider:

• Multiple outages with unacceptable resolution times
• Unpredictable costs for services which hindered accurate budgeting
• Inability to grow with Customer’s plans for strategic expansion
• Lack of end-to-end infrastructure support

Customer Executive Management became concerned with the possibility of their hosting provider discontinuing their service because of a multitude of issues, such as vendor viability and contract language. Customer required access to the CBTS VDC and immediate delivery of hosting services to avoid potential web site shut down, but did not want to be encumbered by two legal contracts for the same service. 

 Solution provided by CBTS

The Customer signed a contract with CBTS to provide a solution that would encompass the building of 180 VPN tunnels to accommodate Internet connection for all store locations, the configuration of firewalls, 6 servers, VDOMs, and VPNs.

In less than ten days, CBTS delivered the VDC to provide immediate web hosting services, which included the components of the standard VDC offering. 

In addition to the pressure of coordinating resources and delivering services in a condensed timeframe, CBTS personnel had to contend with restarting the data restore process after the client inadvertently rebooted when the process was already underway.

CBTS sales, technical services, and operations individuals, collaborated with the Customer team to provide the framework necessary to support this initiative. 

 Personnel Deployed

A full team of CBTS Managed Services specialists worked alongside CBTS Technical Operations Director Tom Simpson, Technical Services Engineer Russ Ginn, and Senior Operations Manager Greg Faulkner. Together the CBTS team worked 10-12 hour shifts for an intense 48 hour period, in the event that their original provider cut off the Customer’s service.  The service was not terminated as expected, which gave the CBTS team additional time to configure the VDC to support the customer.  Other team members included several Network, Windows and Unix System Engineers. 

Results

The Customer’s benefits included:

• Savings of 33% with no reduction in services
• Improved delivery of services
• End-to-end services/support from one vendor offering a dedicated and experienced sales and support team
• Predictable costs
• Flexibility to meet their current and future IT demands

Since the deployment of the VDC, the Customer has engaged CBTS for additional services.

• CBT eVolve MPLS solution for HQ and franchise store operations
• Monitoring and management of VDC servers and firewalls
• Avaya support
• Hosting of back office applications