Email Replatform

Executive Summary

A life sciences company realized significant savings while increasing the scalability and reliability of its email platform.

Case Background

Industry: Life sciences; consumer products
Company: A century-old global manufacturing, development, and distribution company with 50,000 employees and $20B in revenue.

Key Challenges and Goals

The client had a significant investment in Lotus Notes as its email platform, running on IBM iSeries hardware. Given a large installed base of more than 20,000 users, the company had committed to Notes for the long term. However, they were facing a capital investment of approximately $5M to mitigate concerns with reliability, scalability, and business continuity/disaster recovery. The client selected Affinity to evaluate possible alternatives meeting operational and regulatory requirements with better economics, and to provide extensive testing and validation of any proposal.

Affinity's Approach and Solutions

Affinity worked in collaboration with the client team, and with the client’s preferred evaluation tools. The client wanted assurance and evidence that any recommendations would satisfy not only the current requirements, but to have other configurations tested that the client was contemplating for the future. To meet these specifications, Affinity’s analysis, design, and testing processes included several scenarios and roadmaps for the client to consider. This detailed processes ultimately indicated that the client could indeed operate their Notes platform at significantly lower cost yet with a more scalable and reliable architecture, in part by incorporating server and storage virtualization.
 

Results

The project provided $4M in immediate cost avoidance and a further $1M in annual cost reduction, with lower risk of downtime and enhanced scalability. Gross ROI was more than 100% with payback in less than one year.

Project Snapshot

Technology: Lotus Notes and Domino Web Access; IBM iSeries hardware; HP servers and storage; VMWare; LoadRunner

Affinity expertise applied:
- Business and technical process improvement
- Risk management
- Design and testing
- Financial analysis (cost modeling, cost benefit analyses, return on assets/return on investment analyses)
- Change management
- Project management

Project Duration: Less than 1 quarter to analyze, design, test and document

Cost Range: Less than $1M including all hardware, software, and services