Managing over $10 billion in IT infrastructure worldwide, we are the leading provider of IT support and independent maintenance services for Fortune 500 companies, large businesses, carriers, US Federal Agencies, and the back line support provider for almost all third party support companies.

Who?

Companies often purchase hardware from OEM partners. Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, and Citrix, each have partners in the field selling products and most sales are channeled through these partners. The challenge comes in understanding the service that is included in these new purchases. Manufacturers often fail to educate their partners on the services to which new customers are entitled. As a result, these partners are ill-prepared when it comes to sharing entitled service information with their customers; leading to the purchase of additional service level agreements to cover perceived support gaps.

Companies often purchase Service Level Agreements (SLA) to protect during times of crisis. When a piece of hardware goes down, getting it back online is the primary objective. Down hardware costs money and an SLA can mitigate those hits. However, service level agreements are expensive, complex, and difficult to navigate. The issue is further complicated as new hardware agreements and equipment join the business’ infrastructure.

The Situation

A long list of legacy, disparate systems managed across multiple servers made it impossible to efficiently manage data within the IAIW. There were frequent data errors that required significant resources to fix and conditioned those within the IAIW to distrust the information available within the internal systems.

As a long-standing entity, the IAIW data model was outdated and prevented the information from simply dropping into a newly built system. This created a dependence on a single provider who was responsible for completing all updates to the existing, individual systems.

The Arch Response

The Arch team evaluated each disparate system within the IAIW and began documenting the existing data model to better understand the flow of information throughout the organization.

The team then created a master data management layer in Heroku to connect legacy and local systems and modernize the data model. The master data management layer integrates with legacy and local systems to pull data from the disparate systems and send it to Salesforce. To make the data meaningful, the team worked with IAIW’s chief IT officer to create a data translation and relationship modification that normalizes data from all sources into a single data model.

To ensure open access to the data in Salesforce, the RadialSpark team utilized their own PLAN App Accelerator to build an API for use by the IAIW development team. This API was utilized by a mobile application built specifically for the attendees of the IAIW Las Vegas Convention. The solution was so widely praised that it has since been extended to all 600,000 members.