FlexPod Customer Momentum

U.S. Accounting Firm Attains 95% Faster Access to Customer Records

Katz, Sapper and Miller (KSM) is one of the topCertified Public Accountant (CPA) firms in theUnited States. In the tax and accounting business,maximizing time spent on productive billing is amajor priority. With its data footprint growing atroughly 25 percent each year, KSM had outgrownits five-year-old IT infrastructure.

FlexPod Premium Partner Logicalis recommendeda complete data center reinvention based on aFlexPod platform to vastly improve performanceand virtually eliminate down-time.

Now, customer records are instantly searchable—taking less than three seconds to completeinstead of two to three hours with the previoussystems. It is a 95% reduction that has allowedKSM to improve its content managementcapabilities and deliver better customer service.

City Council Cuts Energy

Bill, Improves Capacity by

50%

Salford City Council serves roughly 230,000 citizens frominner city, residential and rural areas of the GreaterManchester region in the northwest of England. The Councilhouses one of the most advanced data center facilities bypublic sector standards, yet capacity constraints werebeginning to appear. Employees were consuming data in newand different ways and departments were operatingindependently and deploying their own IT equipment. Thisfragmentation was leading to security and compliance issues.

In response, Salford City Council transitioned their traditionaldata center to a community cloud based on FlexPod. This hasenabled the Council to establish a solid foundation for thedelivery of cloud services—increasing its server capacity by 50percent and noticeably improving the speed and response ofits applications—while reducing its energy bill by 50 percent todate. Salford City Council has also achieved a five-to-onereduction in data center space requirement, providing theCouncil with room for additional revenue generating hostingservices.

Subsea Systems Supplier Improves Employee Productivity

FMC Technologies is the leading subsea systems supplier,developing advanced products and solutions fordeployment in offshore oil and gas fields. Although thesefields have the potential for massive profits, they also poseimmense logistical challenges that can only be solved withthe best equipment and technologies. For FMC, thatincludes relying heavily on a handful of SAP applications—used by thousands of employees across the company—tokeep track of inventory, production, business processesand people.

With the servers in their data center approaching end-of-life and data center performance needing a boost, FMCturned to FlexPod for a new data center solution. Theenhanced infrastructure has improved system repose timesby up to 50 percent and helped speed reporting turnaroundtimes by up to 400 percent. The FlexPod platform has alsoenabled FMC to achieve an up to tenfold reduction ininput/output congestion. This has meant improvedemployee productivity and more on-time reporting forbetter decision making.

German Bank Transforms Workforce

Mobility

Westdeutsche Genossenschafts-Zentralbank (WGZBank) acts as a central bank for Volksbanken andRaiffeisenbanken, supporting medium sized companiesas well as capital market partners in Rhineland andWestphalia. WGZ Bank had an objective of becomingthe leading financing group in Germany by 2014.

Modern market conditions and regulations posed achallenge for banking; WGZ Bank had to optimize theirIT management as well as improve their workforcemobility and productivity. Computacenter, with supportfrom Cisco Services, helped ensure a smooth migrationand integration of virtual desktops to WGZ Bank’sinfrastructure.

The new FlexPod environment has provided users withinstant access to information, services and applicationsand allowed WGZ Bank to replace 80 percent of theirserver estate. Moving to Flexpod and virtual desktopshas also helped WGZ Bank improve applicationperformance and security, transform their workforce’smobility and, ultimately, increase employee productivity.

Best Best & Krieger achieves 100 percent payback with FlexPod

A full-service law firm with nearly 200 attorneysin nine offices across California and inWashington, D.C. Best Best & Krieger LLP(BB&K) delivers effective, timely and service-oriented solutions for complex legal issuesfacing public agencies, businesses andindividuals. The FlexPod environment provides aunified platform that enables BB&K to move inany direction. With FlexPod Datacenter withCitrix XenDesktop, BB&K achieves 100 percentpayback.

“For a law firm, time means money. With all theefficiencies we’ve enabled with CitrixXenDesktop running on FlexPod, we’ve certainlyrecouped our investment in these technologies,”said Tim Haynes, director of IT, Best Best &Krieger LLP.

German Stock Exchange

Doubles Business

Transactions

Based in Germany, Boerse Stuttgart is Europe's leadingstock exchange organization for private investors.Boerse Stuttgart´s main differentiator in the financialmarket is to execute orders with speed and costefficiency. Their IT strategy and goals are aligned withthese business requirements, with initiatives designedto deliver cost-efficient, reliable and fast service-delivery. With FlexPod, Boerse Stuttgart can nowhandle twice as many business transactions as beforeand even unexpected events like massive stockchanges can be fulfilled with no influence on the qualityof the service-delivery.

“As Europe's leading stock exchange for privateinvestors, it is crucial not only to execute retail orders asfast as possible but in a cost efficient way as well, ” saidPeter Litschel at Boerse Stuttgart. “A sharedinfrastructure based on FlexPod enables us to ‘bridge-the-cloud’ and focus on our core business. With morethan one million tradable products we have to process aconsiderable quantity of trading data. We can now trustthat our operation is efficient, fast and flexible. Thisallows us to focus on providing retail investors with thefinancial services they need.”.