IT upgrade helps OB10 plan for growth

Customer Overview

OB10 is the leading global business-to-business e-invoicing network. Its service enables companies to receive and send invoices electronically, eliminating the need for paper invoices and lengthy manual processing. The company has offices in major cities all over the world, including Kuala Lumpar, Atlanta and London. Its thousands of customers are spread throughout 90 countries in Europe, North America and Asia, and include a broad range of industries and high-profile companies, such as HP, GSK, General Motors, Kellogg's and Barclays.

Business Need

As many of these customers' entire invoicing infrastructures are dependent upon OB10's service, the continuity and reliability of its platform is critical. Chris Lowrie, Senior Vice-President, Operations, at OB10, comments: "Our customers have understandably high expectations. Any unplanned downtime could have a significant impact on both our reputation and profitability." As well as providing a seamless e-invoicing service, OB10's infrastructure must also be able to cope with the company's considerable growth.

As Chris explains: "We are currently processing invoices at a rate of three to four million a year, but by the end of 2007, this will have increased to five million a year. As part of our capacity planning we decided to re-write our e-invoicing platform in a modular java environment to cope with this expansion." To support its new application, OB10 needed a robust and reliable infrastructure that could be scaled in line with the business and its customer base. "To ensure our service remains responsive, we must have a flexible, scalable and highly available infrastructure," adds Chris.

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Solution

Since its foundation in 2000, OB10 has outsourced the management of its infrastructure to Computacenter. To design and deploy the servers, storage and security systems that would form the foundations of its new e-invoicing service, OB10 once again enlisted the help of the IT services giant. "We already had a great relationship with Computacenter. It had the breadth and depth of expertise to deliver the project, and offered a flexible pricing plan that incorporated the set-up charges into a monthly fee," adds Chris.

How Computacenter helped

The key requirement of the new infrastructure, which is based on 15 HP and Sun servers, was scalability. As Dunstan Vavasour, Head Architect on the project for Computacenter, explains: "We developed the architecture in two layers to allow horizontal scaling. This means we can add in extra servers as required to cope with increased customer demand on OB10's e-invoicing network." The infrastructure has been specifically designed to be 'application ready', and its capacity and performance was validated by a comprehensive proof of concept programme.

The main challenge, however, was integrating the technology, which is being leased to OB10 by Computacenter, and ensuring it operated effectively with the new application. To prove this integration in advance of the rollout, Computacenter used its dedicated Solutions Centre testing facility to create a replica environment. As Chris explains: "By using the Solutions Centre, we were able to mitigate the risks of deploying the new environment, and hone the migration process before the go-live date." To further simplify the transfer to the new platform, OB10 was able to draw on the resources of Computacenter's Shared Services Factory, which has created best practice migration processes. Computacenter is also providing support and hosting of the web infrastructure under a five-year Managed Availability contract.

As part of this service, OB10's infrastructure is monitored 24x7 by Computacenter's Operational Command Centre, which aids business continuity. Computacenter is also responsible for the security of the infrastructure, which is protected by anti-virus software and firewalls, and provides a full data backup and capacity management service.

Results

By safeguarding the availability of its infrastructure, OB10 will be able to provide a more reliable and high-quality service to its customers. As Chris explains: "The robustness of the new infrastructure will ensure that our rapidly-expanding customer base is able to access our e-invoicing services round-the-clock. Our reputation and revenues are reliant on our network being up and running 24x7."

In addition to delivering excellent availability, the partnership with Computacenter has reduced OB10's operational costs. "It is not practical for an organisation of our size to carry out 24x7 monitoring of our web infrastructure," comments Chris. "Computacenter is able to provide this service to a very high standard and in a cost-effective manner."

Computacenter has more than eight years' experience of delivering Managed Availability services. OB10 is also in a better position to meet its expansion plans, as Chris confirms: "We can now move into the next phase of growth, knowing that our IT infrastructure can scale with our requirements while still delivering an exceptional service to our customers."