Company: Â FlexITy Solutions
City: Richmond Hill
Province: Ontario
Provide a brief description of the Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative.
The client is a leading film distribution company. From roots as a Canadian record and tape retailer to a global leader in content, the client touches nearly every step of acquisition, production and distribution for film, television and music. Today, the client has grown beyond its modest record store roots bringing film and music to regions around the world. This client is incorporated in Canada reflecting the company’s history as an active Canadian film and television distribution business. The client’s distribution offices is across the globe including Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Benelux, Spain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, South Africa and South Korea. If you turn on a TV, visit a theatre or stream songs, this client makes it all possible. Recent client activities include; 2013: Extends reach into Spain and expands film business in Canada and the UK through acquisition of Alliance Films 2012: Expands Film and Television businesses to the UK and Europe 2011: Acquires and expands footprint in Australia and New Zealand 2009: Announces multi-territory film and TV content deal with iTunes 2008: Acquires and unites Canadian TV producer Barna-Alper and Blueprint Entertainment FlexITy’s experience in the entertainment and media industry was brought in to assist with optimizing the client’s global telephony network and communications strategies. As a global company, the client’s comprehensive network extends around the globe with established entertainment and distribution, staffing over 500 employees across offices in different continents. As such, the voice, data and communication technologies acquired through numerous acquisitions span various platforms, incorporate multiple phone systems with some proving to be archaic. The cost to maintain and support these technologies became an issue. FlexITy assessed all the communications systems, provided a strategy to optimize and standardize the 6 different locations; Toronto, Montreal, Las Vegas, New York City, Washington, London (UK) with further locations to be addressed later this year. FlexITy implemented the following; • Architected and provided a company wide solution for data centre and voice, security and wireless services • Implemented new infrastructure for offices in multiple locations • Provided a cost effective, 24-hour IT support services In the initial phase of implementation, the client has seen a significant decrease in support costs, further savings through optimization and a large increase in productivity and quality of service.
Describe what makes this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative original or innovative.
With globalization, companies must position themselves using technologies to maintain productivity, keep efficient, and to encourage innovation. This gets more difficult when dealing across the borders where language, currency, market acceptance, governing laws and standards and existing SLA’s are quite separate and distinct. It is also not often that global companies lead within the Canadian boundaries as Canadians tend to be more conservative, usually following the Americans. The make-up of this client alone creates uniqueness with its global presence, establishing a leadership role for managing systems from the Canadian headquarters. On the technology front, this initiative is a great highlight of addressing the problems of globalization and the standardization of the network infrastructure around unified communications, data, voice, presence and mobility, essentially how to standardize across oceans and borders. Furthermore, the implementation spotlights unified communications in a different slant as it is being provided by a CRTC-governed IT solutions provider such as FlexITy, versus the usual large telecommunications firm. FlexITy proves it can play in this arena.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s sales or revenues. What changed?
Provide evidence of measurable improvements in sales, revenues, cost reduction, etc.
With the 6 geographies implemented, the client has been experiencing substantial results already; A centralized, secure computing, storage and voice services reduced operational and capital costs while improving compliance and scalability. The client was able to quickly and easily transfer large multimedia files which reduced delays and bandwidth requirements, saved time and improved efficiencies. As a result, the client has experienced a bandwidth savings of approximately 80%. FlexITy allowed for 4-digit dialing to speed communications between offices and helped ensure accessibility to teleworkers. FlexITy’s Managed Services offered a 24-hour, worldwide technical support which allowed the client to focus on its business instead of worrying about IT issues. The support and savings on Cisco unified communications hardware has accumulated between 25%-35% savings with the optimizations. The long-term range will anticipate further savings. As a result of these efficiencies, the client has seen a reduction in IT spend and a much improved quality of service with their distribution business.
Describe the improvement this Solution, Service Provided, or Initiative made to the customer’s efficiency. What changed?
Provide evidence of how customer efficiency was increased.
With the FlexITy implementation there are several ways that proved for greater efficiency and productivity; Budget efficiency. Working in a global footprint can result in substantial communication costs filled with redundancy as technologies are replicated with each of the several offices. An important part of the implementation included a 24-hour support and monitoring by FlexITy, helping ensure the business was covered around the clock. Being a global company, the client truly benefits because the solution set meant centralized support across all locations. Furthermore, the client can be serviced under one service level agreement (SLA) and therefore not worry about technology maintenance or issues. Technology efficiency. A centralized unified communications and collaboration tool set from Cisco was included in the architecture to accelerate applications over the WAN and provide local hosting of branch-office IT services. The technologies allowed IT departments to centralize applications and storage in the data centre while maintaining LAN-like application performance, and provided locally hosted IT services while reducing the branch-office footprint. Client efficiency. By increasing the collaboration vehicles, the client was able to transfer large files quickly and easily to other office locations and the data centre. For instance, a 100MB file that use to take 50 seconds to download from the data centre takes only 5-8 seconds for download. In total, the client experienced a bandwidth savings of approximately 80%. Furthermore, the client has a significant number of teleworkers that travel frequently between office locations. The 4-digit dialing allows accessibility to these workers regardless of their location and the voice messaging system that was implemented permitted convenient access to retrieve voicemail through internet mail access protocol.
How did this Solution, Service provided, or Initiative improve the customer’s ability to serve its internal and/or external clients?
Provide evidence of the improvement.
FlexITy’s solution improved the client’s ability to service its internal clients by; • Providing the tools necessary to communicate and collaborate proactively with little delay through VOIP, 4-digit dialing and a robust voice message system. • Providing Managed Services, so the client can focus on their core business instead of day-day IT management concerns in the different offices • Increase productivity due to the accessibility of their employees, anywhere at anytime FlexITy’s solution improved the client’s ability to service its external clients by; • Providing a better quality of service through the collaboration technologies
In what ways does this Solution or Service Provided go above and beyond industry norms and expectations?
Most unified communication and collaboration services are well known to be provided by the major Telco’s such as Bell, TELUS, Rogers and Allstream. It is beyond the norm that an IT solutions provider is CRTC compliant offering telephony as a service to its customers. Convergence of computing, cloud and the telephone is a key to servicing the clients business needs, especially ones with a global footprint. FlexITy’s success is based on the Unified Communications and Collaboration as a service (UCCaaS) and puts their solutions beyond the norm.
How does this solution further your customer’s green or environmentally friendly plans?
The client’s employees can utilize a mix of voice, video, data, mobility network applications in offices, conference rooms, airport, warehouses and vehicles. Communications is kept in real-time available 24-7, everywhere. Employees are more agile and productive without having to travel constantly to communicate more and more effectively. Collaboration thus has proven key to driving productivity, agility and eventually innovation. The collaboration concept does reduce business travel through such technologies as telepresence, enables teleworking, reduces commute time and optimizes the use of office space. This is what our client was able to benefit from with FlexITy’s implementation. With these efforts, the client can significantly reduce carbon emissions and promote a ‘greener’ work environment.
