Indigo Books and Music Inc. is moving its entire online infrastructure over to Q9 Networks in a three year contract worth an estimated $1.8 million.
The deal,
announced Thursday, will see Q9 host Indigo’s Web site and back end applications like order entry and data management. Q9 will also host data for in-store kiosks for the company’s 280 stores, which are connected to the infrastructure via virtual private networks (VPN).
Previously, Indigo hosted retail data in its own IT department and outsourced Web site hosting to another provider. “”I’m bringing both together under the roof of Q9. The rationale was, I didn’t want to run two separate locations,”” said Bill Schmidt, director of service delivery for Indigo
The Web site was moved over to Q9’s Toronto data centre this week with the retail portion scheduled for next week. As part of the arrangement, Q9 will monitor all the data, which should provide Indigo with a better view of company, said Schmidt. “”Our monitoring platform is all very Microsoft-based. They’re going to be working with us to integrate their systems into the Microsoft Operations Manager. They’re building hooks into that to see the environment as well,”” explained Schmidt. He added that the few Indigo employees who were previously involved in retail data will be moving over to Q9, he added.
Arafat said that the Indigo deal is similar to others the company has signed in recent months, but added “”the challenge is because of their size. We have several large customers and they take a lot more effort and detail and design.””
Q9 recently expanded its operation by acquiring a 160,000 sq. ft. data centre in Brampton, Ont. The centre was previously owned by Exodus Communications Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection last year. Q9 will open another data centre in Calgary later this month.
Customers won’t see any changes to the Indigo Web site, said Schmidt, but it will experience a scheduled blackout this weekend as a result of the move to Q9.
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