April 19, 2012 — Enventis, a subsidiary of HickoryTech (NASDAQ: HTCO), recently completed the deployment of a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) for Young America, an incentive marketing firm, at their headquarters in Edina, Minn. Young America turned to Enventis, a Cisco Gold Certified and Master Unified Communications Partner, to identify a solution that would increase their data center capacity to handle their growing volume of business and enhance performance to boost employee productivity and customer satisfaction. Enventis designed and implemented a UCS solution that integrates resources into a single converged system.
Young America’s existing technology needed to be replaced with much faster and more powerful systems. “At any given time, we were in need of additional CPU capacity, memory or network bandwidth,” said Ted Bienapfl, director of infrastructure, network services, and development at Young America. “We chose Enventis because of their reputation locally and their high-level expertise implementing Cisco based solutions.”
Young America worked with Enventis to help build a turn-key computing environment using Cisco UCS, which would easily integrate with VMware and would provide the foundation for the future replacement of their existing phone system and call center with Cisco Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Contact Center (UCCX) solutions. Enventis utilized a three-phase approach of discovery, design and implementation to identify business and technical requirements for the project and develop the best configuration and deployment strategy for the UCS. As part of the new architecture, Young America upgraded its existing infrastructure to a Cisco UCS-based data center architecture using Cisco Nexus 7000 switches and Cisco Multilayer Fabric Switches.
The solution deployed by Enventis offered Young America the efficiency and reliability they needed to reduce costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Server, network and storage utilization rates have improved significantly, while power usage has significantly decreased. The UCS solution also enables Young America to quickly expand its computing environment as its needs grow.
“The UCS solution reduced our data center footprint to a fraction of what it was and created power and cooling efficiencies,” added Bienapfl. “With this infrastructure upgrade, we basically opened up the floodgates to any and all business submissions. Our customers are noticing the fact that they’re getting their web pages quicker and that they can throw more jobs at us. Most importantly, they are noticing better performance and service across the board.”
Young America will continue to roll out the Cisco UC and UCCX solutions this summer, improving the productivity of more than 300 employees and providing the capability to enhance services to their customers.
