Worldwide Printing Solutions is a specialist graphic design and printing company that delivers over 120 million print items to more than 35,000 customers across Australia each year. The Company has adopted an innovative hub and spoke operating model. This model incorporates specialist design centres located throughout Australia and a centralised printing and distribution facility located in Perth that incorporates the latest print technology.
There are more than 45 design centres that are each operated by franchisees, offering a broad range of print solutions to their clients including: marketing material, brochures, posters, banners, stickers and business merchandise. The local design centres complete the creative design and artwork, which is then uploaded electronically to the central print facility for production and distribution.
The Challenge
Worldwide Printing Solutions relies on a suite of centrally hosted business systems to support their franchisees across Australia. Issues with system reliability and performance prompted a review of the company’s IT delivery model. Following this, the decision was made to appoint a specialist IT service provider who was able to host their applications on a reliable and resilient platform to ensure that they were able to deliver the highest levels of service to their franchisees. They sought a provider who could not only assist them with their initial hosting requirements but with whom they could develop a longer term partnership to assist in addressing the company’s broader IT challenges.
In late 2012, Worldwide Printing Solutions conducted an extensive market evaluation of potential IT solution providers. Following a detailed review, Datacom was selected and the decision was made to move Worldwide Printing Solutions’ applications to Datacom’s Perth cloud node.
The Solution
Datacom initially conducted a thorough audit of Worldwide Printing Solutions existing IT environment, reviewing hardware infrastructure, applications, performance and physical office connectivity requirements. Following the audit, Datacom ran a series of workshops to validate the information and discuss the various solution options.
By working closely with Worldwide Printing Solutions, Datacom was able to provide a customised solution that incorporated:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hosted on Datacom’s Perth cloud node to support their critical applications.
- Software licensing via a monthly “pay as you use” licensing arrangement.
- Professional Services to migrate their applications and associated data to the cloud platform.
- Provision of telecommunication services.
- Managed Services to support their network infrastructure.
The Datacom solution also incorporated a comprehensive backup and recovery solution to protect all data that resides on the cloud platform as well as network management services to ensure reliable connectivity of national offices to the cloud environment.
"From the initial face-to-face meetings, right through to the final sign-off, we found Datacom to be professional and courteous. The transition project was well scoped and planned and was delivered within time and budget. Datacom’s technical lead went above and beyond to ensure a smooth migration and instilled us with the confidence that the job would be done right."
Conrad Goodman - Worldwide Printing Solutions
Results
By taking the time to gain an in-depth understanding of Worldwide Printing Solutions key IT requirements, Datacom was able to provide a solution that met their immediate needs and also addressed their longer-term business requirements.
Paramount for Worldwide Printing Solutions was the fact that Datacom’s cloud platform was built on a secure and resilient technology platform and was hosted in a Datacom owned and managed data centre. Datacom having cloud nodes located across multiple data centres throughout Australia, to which their data could be replicated, was another key consideration in the decision.
By adopting the solution, Worldwide Printing Solutions has not only been able to reduce their overall IT operational costs but also significantly improve performance and rectify past reliability issues.