CBE Technologies went online last month with a new data center that seamlessly ties together its eight New England locations and one in New York City into a highly secure, more effective, and centralized system that incorporates cutting-edge voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology. This new data center is less costly to maintain, operate, and support than the disparate systems it replaced.


Old Systems Were Costly to Maintain and Operate

Over the past few years, CBE expanded the reach and depth of its outsourcing and managed services offerings by acquiring several smaller IT services companies in major New England markets. CBE also purchased FireTower, CBE’s IT security firm and Ntirety, the database administration practice. Each acquisition brought its own IT and telephony equipment and applications to support, resulting in expensive to run, decentralized systems.

"With each acquisition came new systems to support that were not strategically integrated assets," said Peter Cowie, CBE Technologies chief executive officer. "When we looked at the economies of the new data center, we found a large reduction in operating costs and that depreciation expenses would lower the cost of ownership. We also reduced telecommunications costs with VoIP by getting rid of 25 costly phone lines."

Rob Brace, CBE Technologies chief financial officer added, "We now have a centralized system with new safeguards and redundancies built in that reduce downtime. We calculated that there will be a 20 percent savings each year with the new system."

"With the acquisitions, we picked up a difficult- and expensive-to-manage spider web of applications, hardware, and networks. We needed to follow the same advice we give to our customers and move to a system that improves IT efficiencies while reducing costs," explained Randy Becker, CBE Technologies chief information officer.

"We centralized our internal information services with easy to deploy and manage HP BladeSystem servers and SAN as the core technologies," continued Becker. "We are using the Citrix access infrastructure to securely tie together our offices, Cisco LAN, WAN, and secure VoIP connectivity technology. And because the new system is scalable, it will easily grow with us. New offices can be connected to the new system very quickly."

Additionally, Microsoft clustering technology helps ensure that applications are always available. Microsoft SharePoint products give CBE users the ability to organize information, readily access that information, manage documents, and enable efficient collaboration in a familiar, browser-based and Microsoft Exchange and Office-integrated environment. CBE also incorporated RSA Security’s SecurID two-factor authentication services for enterprise networks to help positively identify users before they interact with CBE’s mission-critical data and applications.

From the end users viewpoint, the weekend turnover to the new system was transparent. That Monday morning, CBE employees went about their work without disruption like the migration did not happen at all. Except the entire CBE sales force was also online with new and improved account management systems that help them be even more responsive to customer needs. Plus, with the new VoIP system, any road warrior benefited from working out of another CBE office accessing their phone calls, voice mail, office applications, and faxes like they were sitting at their own desks.

Additionally, the new data center and its VoIP applications serve as a showcase of CBE’s capabilities for customers considering a move to VoIP and overhauling their IT infrastructures.

"The new data center is a great illustration of IT as a strategic asset that makes sense to the bottom line," summarized Becker.