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Small and mid-sized companies build their success of timing, integrity and trust – so it’s no wonder then that businesses as diverse as law firms and florists are leaning more heavily than ever on IT for the competitive edge in the marketplace.
But these companies need more than products. They need expert support and guidance. Here’s the story of three businesses, each with a unique set of challenges – but all sharing a common need for a partner in IT.
The PR Firm: In touch
Graham Stoddart-Stones, global CIO of leading public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, constantly has e-mail on his mind.
“The particular requirement of any PR company is to have very fast and very reliable e-mail,” says Stoddart-Stones. “We need to be told if there are even five-minute delays in our e-mail delivery,” he says.
High on his list are reducing costs and administrative overhead while improving performance and reliability by consolidating servers. “We’ve already decided that HP is our standard. For example, we’ve consolidated the Exchange 2003 mail system down to four servers from 35,” he says.
The reliability of HP ProLiant DL380 servers with the HP 6402 Smart Array system (with MessageOne’s Business Continuity service for Exchange in reserve) means, “we feel no need for server redundancy—that makes for a very economical solution without sacrificing any reliability,” says Stoddart-Stones.
Law Firm: Constantly archiving
At Thompson Dorfman Sweatman, a Winnipeg, Canada-based law firm, Trevor Anderson tends to the IT demands of a 170-person legal team. His biggest concern? “Storage has ballooned over the past few years,” Anderson says. “You can’t imagine how much data people want to store, and it’s all data related to doing business.”
How does he do it? “We use internal SCSI drives in various RAID arrays in our HP ProLiant servers depending on performance needs as well as application and data type. They’re typically 15,000 RPM drives, although we’re also starting to adopt HP’s recent SAS drives.”
Anderson adds, “We also use dedicated HP storage devices such as Modular Smart Arrays and NAS (network attached storage) for somewhat latent or redundant data such as disk-to-disk backups or static data such as images.”
The Online Store: Avoiding downtime
Tropical Singapore couldn’t be farther away from frosty Winnipeg, and the challenges facing Ryan Chioh of the online floral and gift store FarEastFlora.com are different as well. “One of the IT challenges of a heavily transactional business like this is that it’s imperative to be totally stable, with 100 percent uptime. If our systems go down, our business comes to a grinding halt,” says Chioh, the store’s executive director .
His strategy? Deploy an HP ProLiant ML350 Server with HP ProLiant RAID Controller and a HP ProCurve switch to increase the number of transactions his business can handle. For redundancy he’s included a pair of hot-swappable RAID 10 mirroring hard disks.
Using HP resources and expertise, FarEastFlora.com found a way to print directly on fragile flower petals. This eye-catching innovation got the company coverage on the local TV news and opened up a new sales channel for lucrative corporate business.
Today Chioh is forecasting 30 to 40 percent annual growth, and he credits HP with helping his business blossom.
“Sometimes a small business can feel like it's hard to approach a big company like HP, but we’ve found our relationship to be quite satisfying,” attests Chioh. “We don't feel like we get lost in the shuffle. I know they care about my business.”
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