Steelforce - Case Study
www.steelforce.com.au
Company Background:
Steelforce is a major producer of steel pipe and tube products as well as a distributor of steel products including structural steel, merchant bar, steel pipes and tube and a range of flat products and angles. Such products are sold direct to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), resellers, fabricators, the construction industry (residential and non-residential) and rural industries with no particular dependency on one industry segment.
Since its foundation in April 2000 Steelforce has captured a significant share of the Australian steel distribution industry. Success has been based upon three key selling points: long term relationships, stock availability and service. Bringing ‘service’ to this industry has been a major differentiator and as such a solid, loyal customer base now exists.
Challenge:
Steelforce required a solid business technology platform to enable extensive national growth to occur quickly. The company created an aggressive growth plan to become a truly national company with offices in every state of Australia within a few months. A technology platform that was reliable, scalable and manageable was required immediately to permit this level of growth to occur.
The IT Associates Solution:
Upon engaging Steelforce as a client, IT Associates immediately centralised all of their core business platform servers into its Brisbane data centre, implemented Microsoft’s Active Directory structure, deployed Microsoft Exchange platform and set up all users as terminal users. Within weeks the technology platform began to take shape, after which time a complete national private WAN network was deployed to all offices across all states of Australia. This subsequently provided the seamless connectivity into Steelforce’s core servers, where all users were provided with reliability, speed, security and a non-compromised operational experiences to help make the company fly.
IT Associates then continued to build in more servers to handle the national user base load and ultimately virtualisation came into play. At the peak there were 15 physical servers in operation, whereas today we have three managed servers providing a virtualised platform to empowering their core business technology need.
This IT Associates solution was featured in the July 2008 issue of CRN's "Virtualisation Case Study" available here:
http://www.crn.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=117438
