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Dell helps Canadian SaaS provider Distributech/InvestorCom to increase IT availability, improve disaster recovery, enhance data security and reduce costs.

Founded in 1992, Toronto-based Distributech/InvestorCom initially handled the direct mail marketing needs for some of Canada’s major brands. As the number of companies outsourcing their marketing communications, financial publishing and e-commerce functions has grown, Distributech/InvestorCom has developed from a traditional marketing and print fulfilment company to a multi-platform software-as-a-services (SaaS) provider.

Today, Distributech provides three SaaS platforms, including a marketing automation web portal called DOXTM and an InvestorPOSTM reporting solution for the financial services and insurance industries. It also offers Pivotal ContactTM, a data mining, analytics and business intelligence service for marketers.

According to Randy McIver, vice president of IT, the company’s SaaS operations are fast overtaking its more traditional functions. “We’re quickly building out a set of strong SaaS offerings from our legacy brick warehouse and print operations,” he says. “Half our growth is due to these new channels we’ve opened up.”

Each day, Distributech/InvestorCom’s IT infrastructure handles millions of varied online data transactions, such as e-commerce orders, client files and data transferred via web service calls. To boost its capacity to manage such high levels of traffic and improve disaster recovery and security, the company needed to replace its existing multi-vendor IT patchwork.

“We were starting to have availability issues and clearly needed to upgrade to newer technology platforms,” says McIver. “At the same time, we needed to simplify and make our IT systems much more efficient to operate and grow.”

Assisted by Dell Deployment Services, Distributech/InvestorCom implemented an end-to-end infrastructure solution comprised of components from Dell’s hardware and software portfolios.

According to McIver, Distributech/InvestorCom chose Dell because it was willing to share its architectural expertise before the sale to help design the solution, while Dell Financial Services provided a lease-to-own arrangement to enable the company to acquire the solution while conserving capital.

The main reason for choosing Dell was that it could provide one source for the company’s much-needed refresh of its end-to-end infrastructure, both at the Toronto co-location data center near its headquarters and at another co-located disaster recovery site in a nearby suburb.

“Dell could provide everything from switching to servers to storage, firewalls, and backup, which greatly simplifies overall IT management and scaling for growth,” explains McIver. “We saved months and a lot of risk in getting our solution designed, deployed and running by using Dell Deployment Services.”

Distributech/InvestorCom installed three Dell PowerEdge R620 servers, two Dell Networking N4024 10GbE Layer 3 switches and one Dell EqualLogic PS6210 storage area network with 18TB of usable capacity in its main data center. In addition, Microsoft Hyper-V was used to virtualize 50 physical servers, which are managed by Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The company also deployed a similar setup at its disaster recovery site for replication and failover.

“Overall we reduced our server footprint by 75% and halved our energy use by virtualizing our systems on Dell PowerEdge servers,” McIver says. “At the same time, we boosted our systems availability significantly and we’re now seeing huge performance gains with our new Dell end-to-end infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, the company implemented Dell PowerVault tape backup systems and Dell SonicWall firewalls to provide Canada’s major banks and other financial institutions with improved data security and to help them achieve regulatory compliance.

In addition, Distributech/InvestorCom’s acquired a large quantity of Dell Latitude laptops for executive and sales teams, enabling them to remotely connect to the company’s enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems. Dell Latitude 6 Series laptops and Dell OptiPlex PCs are now standard for all employees.

One of the biggest benefits of the new Dell infrastructure is that Distibutech/Investorcom’s team can now manage all systems more easily. The team uses Microsoft System Center to manage the virtual servers and Dell OpenManage Essentials to control all the Dell hardware including servers, storage, networking and SonicWall firewall appliances. In addition, the OpenManage Mobile application also gives staff remote access to health status information via any smart device.

“We estimate that it will save hundreds of hours of IT time-savings per year,” says McIver. “Morale is so much higher since the team is now doing a lot less ‘firefighting’ and is able to work with some of the latest technologies.”

The post Boosting IT capacity appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

It could not be more critical for retailers to bridge the gap between digital and their bricks-and-mortar stores than it is today, says Xomni CEO Chad Brown. “When you think about what the store does for the online channel, and vice versa, it should be about creating a sense of continuity,” he explains. “Bring those channels together and you truly maximize your return on investment, and satisfy the customer.”

Xomni – a company whose name stands for ‘Experience Omni-channel’ – is achieving this vision through a cloud-based omni-channel experience enablement platform. The company caters for creative interactive agencies who want to leverage the Xomni Cloud to gain access to retailers’ existing systems, add new data sources (think IoT), orchestrate the data and leverage a consistent API to develop applications. Xomni Cloud also incorporates retail-specific functionality that makes building visually rich concierge, assisted selling and self-service applications easy.

“The idea of using a cloud platform to develop applications isn’t new,” says Brown. “However, we are not talking about one-size-fits-all applications. The Xomni model is unfettered UX and scenario development that enables contextual and personalized experiences without compromising massive scale. If our channel partners can dream it, they should be able to build it.”

This March, Xomni launched the third generation of its cloud platform, complete with significant scalability enhancements. “We base our performance requirements on what a retailer might experience during peak shopping days,” says Daron Yondem, CTO of Xomni. “For example, a tier-one retailer’s requirements include 60 queries per second and 11 gigabytes of data. With the release of Xomni Cloud v3 we can scale well beyond the industry’s current need.”

Cost effective and quick to implement, the solution incorporates a blend of typical retail functionality along with some novel capability designed to accelerate innovation.

One such feature is OmniPlay. Highlighted in a recent GameStop win (see Next-generation store), OmniPlay allows individual assets, product views or the customer presence to be passed from one device to another, assuming certain rules are met (geofence, beacon location or device capability). In this implementation, video content can be initiated from a consumer or associate device and sent to a 4K display in store, significantly increasing the ROI of a passive digital sign by making it interactive.

The GameStop experience is a compelling one, however, as Brown notes, one challenge that Xomni faces is the perception of complexity. “The term omni-channel inspires thoughts of user-centric, integrated, immersive and, by connection, complicated experiences,” he says. “First, Xomni makes integration with existing systems easy; second, although Xomni provides a seemingly endless list of features and supported scenarios, no one said you must use them all in one application! We encourage the use of what we call ‘micro experiences’ to engage customers in a meaningful but simplistic way. From there, you can encourage a deeper engagement.”

With the launch of Xomni Cloud v3, all the tools are there to build deep ‘macro experiences’ and more pointed ‘micro experiences.’ Version 3.1, which is targeted for a June release, will build on this thanks to the adoption of API Management – a new feature of Microsoft Azure.

“APIs bring innovation and agility, and at the same time drive a lot of data that can and should be used to improve user experience,” says Evgeny Popov, principal program manager at Microsoft. “That is why we teamed up with Xomni to deliver a powerful end-to-end retail platform.”

“Really, Xomni Cloud v3.1 should be called v4 as we consider it to be a major release,” adds Brown. “It’s significant for many reasons, but primarily because it will allow us to easily incorporate super innovative third-party technology partners such as My Style Genie.”

A new Xomni Technology Partner, My Style Genie is an expert in dynamic recommendations and has technology capable of putting together coordinating products that are highly relevant based on personal style, preferences, use, or even margin.

“Through this partnership, retailers are able to provide the high-touch personalized service of days gone by in store, mobile, outbound or online,” says Laura Khoury, CEO at My Style Genie. “Our web service enables retailers to serve shoppers as a trusted personal assistant to help them find the best products for them, and suggest complete ensembles tailored to their objectives and style. The result is a win-win experience – customers are delighted with the personal service they receive and retailers have increased basket size and customer loyalty.”

Behind the Xomni-My Style Genie integration is thebigspace, a specialist in retail consumer engagement and connected experiences.

“Our Omni-Channel Style Guide application needed the power, speed and flexibility of Xomni and the dynamic integrated analytics of the MSG recommendation engine to quickly analyze data,” says founding director Dick Lockard. “Working together, we’ll be able to optimize the customer’s buying decision and create highly targeted and relevant connections while maximizing profit for retailers.”

Of course, as Brown knows all too well, the future of retail is always evolving. “The question is, what’s next?” he says. “If anyone tries to tell you definitively what the future of retail engagement is, they’re making it up. No one knows! This is why flexibility is core to our platform. We’ll involve the best partners, give them the utmost flexibility and see what great things happen!

The post Cloud-powered user experiences appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

08.20.2014 Karen McCandless

Why did you decide to choose SharePoint to power the site?

What were the timescales on this – when did you start the deployment and how long did it take to roll out?

What benefits does your new corporate intranet and social networking site provide?

How have your employees reacted to the new sites?

Can you give any specific examples of how the sites are improving the way employees work?

What other Microsoft technology are you using Windows 8?

Why did you choose Windows 8 as opposed to any other operating systems?

Are you using any other Microsoft technology in your business?

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