Achieving a Successful Corporate Relocation with IT Infrastructure to Support a Rapidly Expanding Business
ABOUT THE CUSTOMER
Since 1988, ESP has manufactured premium energy intelligence and power protection solutions. The company’s award-winning portfolio helps businesses worldwide lower service costs and improve the reliability and profitability of critical equipment. From the Hubble Space Telescope to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, industry leaders have relied on ESP’s patented technology to reduce downtime, manage services and enhance the operations of their business.
Headquartered in Knightdale, North Carolina, the company has approximately 150 employees. Since its inception, equipment manufacturers and dealers throughout the world have recommended ESP’s patented power protection technology to protect their equipment and enhance the operations of their business.
CHALLENGE
ESP has a longstanding relationship with Ricoh as a supplier of power protection devices and through working with its local Ricoh representatives to meet the company’s needs for multifunction products (MFPs). When the company began planning to move to a new, larger facility because of the rapid expansion of its business, it turned to Ricoh for the IT services and solutions it needed to support the move.
“It was critical to our business to transition to our new facility quickly and seamlessly,” said Dave Perrotta, chief operating officer of ESP. “Our plan was to accomplish the move in a four day period, including a weekend, and be back up and running when we flipped the switch on the following Tuesday morning. Our Ricoh representative approached us to let us know that they had teams dedicated to IT and audio visual (A/V) solutions, and Ricoh ended up being instrumental in the planning and execution of our move.”
SOLUTION
In initial planning sessions concerning the move, ESP and the Ricoh team identified a number of critical IT issues that needed to be addressed. The Ricoh team designed a four phase plan to address these needs as follows:
- Phase One: An upgrade of the company’s existing analog phone system to a robust Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony solution.
- Phase Two: The design, architecture and installation of the IT infrastructure at the new facility including state-of- the-art A/V equipment and the relocation and installation of IT-related hardware during the move.
- Phase Three: Design and implementation of a virtualized network environment and disaster recovery solution.
- Phase Four: Outsourcing management of the company’s IT resources to Ricoh.
RESULTS
The company’s relocation was successfully accomplished in the planned four day time frame and the Ricoh team’s expertise and services-led approach delivered a number of benefits to ESP.
“Our new VoIP phone system dramatically improves our flexibility and mobility and enables us to save on equipment and operating costs because it can easily be reconfigured,” said Perrotta. “With the heads-up display feature, we can accomplish all phone functions from our desktops, including seeing who is on the phone, conferencing with multiple people, sending text messages and forwarding messages. We can also use our smartphones the same way we use our office phones when on the road.”
The design of the new IT infrastructure is improving ESP’s efficiency and cost- effectiveness. “Ricoh upgraded our entire IT infrastructure, which was overtaxed in our old facility. We needed enhanced speed, wireless connectivity, improved capacity and cutting-edge A/V equipment for our new conference rooms. The Ricoh team delivered all of that,” explained Perrotta.
The Ricoh team migrated ESP from multiple physical servers to a virtual server environment. Virtualization gives ESP scalability, redundancy and lower cost of operation. The IT design also included moving the company’s data off of the server to a Storage Area Network (SAN), which will extend the server life and allow for future expansion without having to upgrade servers or Random Access Memory (RAM). Additionally, the Ricoh team installed a back-up disaster recovery (BDR) solution which maintains a back-up copy of all company data on a separate appliance.
Ricoh is managing the new IT environment as well. “We don’t have a full IT staff. We have a tech support engineer who also doubles as our internal IT person, which is why it made sense for us to rely on Ricoh to manage the infrastructure that they designed and put in place,” said Perrotta.
Perrotta is very pleased with the way Ricoh partnered with the company to ensure it had the right network infrastructure for its new facility and with the ongoing benefits of working with Ricoh’s IT Services team.
“Ricoh mapped out and delivered an excellent solution that enabled us to make a seamless move to our new headquarters with the IT infrastructure and support we need to allow us to continue to rapidly expand our business. We’re now in a new year and are working closely with Ricoh on some additional projects, such as upgrading our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, that will expand our IT capabilities even further. We are confident that Ricoh is an IT partner that can truly help us stay in front of the technology that will enhance our business,” said Perrotta.
