Client Profile

One of the Caribbean’s leading conglomerates with operations in food, financial services and retail.
Revenues in 2007 of JA$48.75 billion
Over 2,000 users across 7 countries


Business Situation

In 2006 this group was restructuring its corporate offices to reduce expenses. While it was recognized that Information Technology (IT) was critical to the group’s operations and future growth, the cost of maintaining the IT infrastructure was too high. Options were explored to reduce these costs while maintaining or improving on current levels of service.

Technical Situation

The Group Management Information Systems (MIS) department was a traditional cost centre in the corporate office and provided services to the corporate office and subsidiaries in the group. The department managed 50 Windows servers, the telecommunications network to approximately 50 locations in Jamaica, the VPN connections to offices in North America and the UK, IT security services, desktop support, and support for various software applications.

The servers were housed in 2 data centers, one at Cable & Wireless and the other at the company’s own data centre. The department had 16 employees providing the services above. The multiplicity of roles resulted in resources being over utilized and costs being higher than best practices.

Solution

The company outsourced the management of the group’s central IT infrastructure and IT security services to tTech while retaining responsibility for the business applications and desktop support. tTech consolidated the servers into one data centre at Cable & Wireless (allowing the company owned data centre to be shuttered) and implemented network monitoring and management tools to enable remote management of the servers and telecommunications network. These steps, along with the introduction of Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) resulted in a 20% reduction in the costs of managing the core IT infrastructure and security services outsourced to tTech. This was achieved with improved service levels and accountability for the IT function.

The Result

Apart from the 20% reduction in costs, the IT personnel retained in the group have been more effective at supporting the IT applications and users throughout the group. This has been made possible because (a) they do not have to manage and support both applications and infrastructure, and (b) the business applications operate more reliably as downtime on the underlying infrastructure (servers, networks and security) has been reduced..