RIDDING THE IT DEPARTMENT OF the burden of maintenance and simply keeping systems online is becoming an increasingly popular strategy, enabled by infrastructure automation and developments such as cloud computing, but the idea of letting someone else handle the day-to-day business of IT has been around for some time in the form of outsourcing and managed services.

For companies operating in emerging markets particularly, business can expand rapidly across diverse territories, meaning IT systems and solutions are required to support growth when the company cannot quite provide the operational level of delivery that is necessary. Panasonic Middle East faced just this situation, with growing regional business meaning IT staff time was taken up just with ‘keeping the lights on’, instead of being able to deliver new and innovative services to the organisation, its partners in the market and customers. Sharjil Salem, senior manager for infrastructure and data centre in the IT department of Panasonic Marketing Middle East FZE, outlines the challenge it faced: “In expanding our regional presence in the Middle East, we needed to ensure that all of our IT operations would operate like clockwork to support our business in the region. A large chunk of time was being consumed by routine day-to-day management of the IT infrastructure by our internal IT team.

Rather than dealing with the mundane operational activities of IT, we needed to understand the technology needs of the business and address them such that it would benefit Panasonic’s bottom line. Having little time to innovate and understand the business’ needs made it increasingly challenging to nurture or demonstrate innovation for the business,” says Salem.

In 2007, the company decided to relieve this burden by looking to a hosted solution, and after performing due diligence, launched into a deal with UAEbased eHosting DataFort (eHDF). The initial project saw eHDF hosting Panasonic’s SAP ERP deployment, serving Panasonic’s internal user base across six representative offices in the Middle East, and connecting back to Panasonic Corporation’s global headquarters in Japan.

The relationship included hosting and management of the SAP Business Information Warehouse - the business intelligence and data warehousing component of SAP which provides management reporting relating to sales, procurement, profitability analysis, stock positions and inventories. eHDF helped Panasonic by managing its IT infrastructure right up to the operating system level, with connectivity and operations also handled by eHDF.

The initial project included knowledge transfer between eHDF’s application and service support team and Panasonic’s own IT team, along with the deployment of an online data centre monitoring system, which enables Panasonic’s employees to keep track of all events, activities and service desk calls, giving transparency into the service. Service level agreements governed the terms of the contract, including issues such as the amount of downtime.

Salem comments: “A mutual learning curve between eHDF and Panasonic at the start of the relationship was necessary, and it meant that there was a need for us to adapt and break away from the typical routine jobs we were used to, while eHDF needed to gain an understanding of the way that our business operates.”

The project also included the migration of Panasonic’s storage area network (SAN) to eHDF, which was also then added into eHDF’s standard monitoring model, with the storage infrastructure expanding approximately 20% year-on-year since migration.

Since the initial SAP ERP project, Panasonic has increased its hosted services deal considerably, as the company has looked to launch more services to support the business and its partners, and to hand off the maintenance and management of those to eHDF.

One core part of this, is eHDF’s hosting of Panasonic’s database cluster. This database facilitates all of the web-based services used by the electronics manufacturer and enables several key Panasonic solutions.

Panasonic’s corporate website for the Middle East, which was earlier hosted in a separate location, has been migrated to eHDF’s hosting environment. Subsequently, the setup was further expanded to include Panasonic’s signature loyalty programme and direct marketing tools as well.

The Plus Card programme is a consumerfacing loyalty scheme, for Panasonic retail consumers, with the solution handling the automatic accumulation of points every time a Panasonic purchase is made at any of the authorised agent’s electronic retail stores. It also allows consumers to administer their loyalty account online, and giving Panasonic’s sales team a direct route to its consumers.

The system also benefits partners, through Panasonic’s online spare parts ordering system, which has also been migrated to eHDF recently.

Panasonic’s business partners are now able to place their spare part requests through an online system, which can then be automatically seen and registered by the Panasonic procurement team in real-time.

The order can then be placed as soon as the information is acknowledged, improving the flow of the procurement cycle and ensuring the products are delivered in the right time frame. This solution also provides warehouse management for the spare parts division.

Another web-based service is a forecast planning application, which provides data to internal staff in areas such as weekly sales, product availability and inventory information. This then helps those staff members with business decision making and strategy planning.

“The partnership has meant that our ability to meet the ever-growing technology demands has greatly improved,” said Salem. “Through real time collaboration and exchange of business information, distinct content and transactions relating to logistics and shipping information can now be shared with our partners who can share sales-related information with our internal users.

“We are also in the design phase of creating a solution that will facilitate agents in their sales process. Some services for consumers are also in the pipeline. In short, the system will improve the efficiency of the information and transaction processing cycle, making selling more effective. That will ultimately benefit our customers,” he adds. The relationship has included other services for Panasonic internal users, such as the introduction of BlackBerry services.

Panasonic previously struggled to find and manage the necessary connectivity, monitoring and security solutions to deploy the mobility solution, but through working with eHDF, the infrastructure and network protection application components were already in place so that Panasonic’s BlackBerry users were able to start operating the smart phone device immediately.

Since 2007, as more and more bandwidth-hungry applications were added to Panasonic’s portfolio, the need for a larger gateway to the internet was felt. To address this need Panasonic’s link to the internet was doubled, as was the connection between eHDF and Panasonic’s regional headquarters in Jebel Ali, Dubai, increasing the speed of connectivity and, ultimately, the exchange of information needed to generate a faster flow of data, work and outcomes.

“System downtime has reduced dramatically,” says Salem. “The hosted infrastructure provides a much higher level of availability to our IT systems. We now have the time to address the technological needs that can impact our business’ bottom line. Rather than getting consumed with ‘keeping the lights on’ activities we can now contribute towards innovation and think about what further drives the Panasonic business to success and increased growth.” For Salem and his IT team, that represents real progress.