Massive growth requires a special kind of support that’s flexible, functional and fast.
When this household brand name advertising company was sold and needed to decouple from its behemoth telecommunications parent company, they required premium, experienced, reliable IT support–and fast. They needed to both change their internal infrastructure and roll out sales campaign offices across the country.
The company didn’t have nearly enough technical operations staff to support the hot and fast growth requirements. They initially considered hiring a project manager who would be charged with managing the sales campaign office project including coordinating multiple vendors for everything from internet services to warehousing hardware to field services support. But before the project even kicked off, the vice president of infrastructure and technical operations had second thoughts about the arrangement.
“Since our PM would also be a vendor, I would have been responsible for all the contractors,” said the vice president of Infrastructure and technical operations. “It would have been impossible to keep up based on my other responsibilities, especially during this critical transition period.”
Instead, they turned to VIMRO to provide the whole package.
Tight Turn-Around, Minimal Oversight
Although the company had permanent offices around the country, they were identifying smaller territories as ripe for targeted sales campaigns as part of their growth plan. They wanted to quickly set up temporary regional campaign offices that could act as home base for a small sales team for anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months and then, just as quickly, be torn down when the intense campaign period was over. But they wanted the same services the employees would have at a permanent office including equipment, network access, all internal sales tools, printing, etc.
They had chosen a hardware solution that allowed full access to the new corporate WAN resources, but they needed assistance with the logistical challenges of managing the hardware deployments, configurations and testing. Additionally, the company lacked the staff to organize and implement both setup and tear down, and to provide on-going support for hundreds of new and constantly moving offices. They were looking for a partner that could deliver:
- Predictable and manageable maintenance costs to satisfy financial and business units
- Scalable on-demand resources to handle the nationwide work with extremely short notice
- Logistics and project management with minimal oversight
The VIMRO team had already proven themselves an invaluable partner to this company during build-out of a data center and had been providing professional services to their former parent company for a number of years. Additionally, VIMRO was willing (and able) to take on the sales campaign office project despite very little lead time and a fairly fluid scope.
“Within just a few weeks, VIMRO was rapidly deploying remote offices,” the vice president of Infrastructure and technical operations said. “We would give them a date and an address, and they would take care of everything.”
Making Regional Sales Deployment Quick and Easy
For new locations, the VIMRO team organized the schedule, ordered and configured internet connectivity and deployed a consistent hardware solution which included Cisco Connected Branch-Office-in-a-Box with Cisco IP phones, Cisco Wireless APs and printers. Finally, VIMRO arranged internal staff to go out and do the actual work–build out the infrastructure and networking, as well as troubleshoot and provide ongoing support.
Initially, the company was only able to provide VIMRO 1- to 2-weeks’ notice when they needed a new campaign office completed, and many of the locations were in rural areas far from major airports. Furthermore, the company was migrating employees from one organization to the other, and there was no time for hand-holding or oversight.
Despite the challenges, VIMRO rolled out more than 130 offices for the company that first year including complete network infrastructure and completed 91 tear-downs.
”VIMRO was in the trenches with us during a pretty intense transition and their commitment to quality was exceptional,” said the vice president of Infrastructure and technical operations.
“All their people are high performers and they don’t leave a job site until they feel they can put their name on it with confidence and pride.”
