Bell Integration ensures its mail systems and business-focused collaboration applications are always available.
Partnering with Bell Integration enables this world-renowned cruise organisation to utilise a managed service that optimises the reliability and performance of its Domino infrastructure and minimises the risk of unplanned interruptions for the business.
Background
Delivering a world class service
This cruise operator is a market leader in the industry. Operating ships all over the world, the firm is most widely known for owning two iconic cruise brands. Between them, the brands operate a combined fleet of 10 ships which plough the seas 365 days a year with over 25,000 employees.
Ensuring all personnel can depend upon a reliable e-mail service is a business-critical imperative for this cruise company. Over the years, the firm has built out an extensive Domino/Notes environment that enables it to deploy and manage collaboration services, e-mail and messaging platforms alongside customised databases, applications, and integrated workflows for both shore and ship-based teams.
The unique and powerful client architecture offered by Domino and Notes made the technology the ideal choice for an organisation that needs to assure operational cohesion across geographic boundaries. One that has proved especially effective for enabling the all-important e-mail synchronisation that on-board teams need when sailing between ports.
Today, the cruise liners HQ in the UK houses the head offices of both its brands and is the UK base for two of its parent company’s brands. In total, the building is home to around 1,400 employees, all of whom are reliant on the Domino environment being up and always available to do their jobs.
The requirement
Maintaining skillsets in a fast-moving world
In a world where e-mail is the primary channel for business communication and collaboration, today’s users expect to be able to access their email at any time of the day, and from any location.
Which is why this cruise organisation needs to ensure its Domino environment is always available, operates flawlessly and that embedded workflows continue to deliver key workplace capabilities to every employee.
“Our Domino environment is at the heart of practically everything we do, so maintaining operational stability at the lowest possible cost is a top priority,” says the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the company.
Based at the HQ, investing the time and effort needed to assure 24×7 optimised service levels represented a significant resource burden for the IT team. Similarly, maintaining the required in-house skillsets for Domino technology was a difficult proposition to resource.
“Making the move to a managed service model enables us to offload routine tasks like system monitoring and patching and focus instead on core projects. It also gives us the ability to tap into certified specialists who have the skills and know-how we need to optimise the resilience of our existing environment and ensure we’re able to extract the maximum value from our technology investments,” says the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the cruise company.
To assure the highly stable environment its operations depend upon, the organisation needed to work with a trusted partner that would proactively address problems before they even arise.
The solution
Assuming Business as Usual Operations
Working with Bell Integration has provided the cruise liner with a safe pair of hands that adds value to its day-to-day operations.
“In today’s world, e-mail represents a key commodity for doing business and users expect it to be always there – no matter what,” explains the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the cruise operator. “Over the years, Bell Integration has established itself as a truly trusted service partner that can be depended upon – day-in, day-out – to assure the highly stable and highly available environment we need.”
Delivering 24x7x365 support to the organisation’s land and sea operations, Bell Integration is responsible for the governance and management of all infrastructure and applications. As well as ensuring that changes, patch management and incident management are undertaken in an ITIL conformant manner, Bell also handles all vendor escalations and proactively monitors the entire environment.
“Bell doesn’t just passively sit in the background, delivering a remote service desk and undertaking support provisioning. Their people are constantly assessing the performance and capacity of our environment and will pre-emptively act to remediate potential problems,” continues the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the cruise firm.
Detailed reports, together with quarterly service review meetings, ensure the IT team at the organisation has full insight into what’s happening in their environment today – and what’s on the horizon with regard to how support needs to be realigned with changing operational needs.
“Quite simply, Bell gets the work gets done – so much so that one of my colleagues once commented that Bell is the most over-performing suppliers we work with,” confirms the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the cruise operator.
The outcomes
A Trusted Strategic Partner
Over the years, the relationship has evolved to such a degree that today Bell Integration is viewed as a valued strategic partner.
“The breadth of their capabilities, combined with their open and transparent ways of working, means that we’ve become increasingly reliant on Bell for services that extend beyond the delivery of remote managed services for our Domino environment,” comments the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the organisation.
“Recently, we’ve deployed one of their Principal Consultants to work in our Server and Storage Team as we prepare for a major new enterprise implementation project – and is now viewed as a crucial member of the team,” he continues.
As the cruise firm proceeds with its plans to rationalise its supplier base, the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the organisation says that Bell Integration is set to become its partner of choice for day-to-day projects and 24×7 support needs.
“One of the great benefits of working with Bell Integration is that we can tap into these specialist people resources as needed – switching services on and off as needed.
This enables us to supplement our skills and access exceptional personnel who can work alongside our own people in a highly integrated and collaborative way.”
Why Bell Integration?
When it comes to providing a highly responsive and flexible service that’s always aligned with the needs of the business, Bell Integration has proved its worth as a reliable and accountable partner that is willing to listen.
“Bell Integration is highly attuned to our evolving operational needs – they listen, share and adapt in a truly flexible way. Delivering against stringent SLAs is a given, but Bell Integration takes it that one step further. Which is why they’ve become such a pivotal part of our business – and increasingly act as an extension to our team,” explains the Senior Manager, Technology Services at the cruise operator.
The mutual respect is such that whenever the organisation’s service teams plan changes to the Domino environment the first question that gets raised is; ‘does Bell’s tech team know about this – and do they approve?’.
“We depend on Bell to sense check any planned actions that relate to our Domino/Notes environment – they know it inside out and understand exactly how tweaks and changes can have unexpected repercussions,” he continues.
As the cruise operator prepares to progress its digital transformation agenda, the plan is to call on Bell Integration for further support and expertise.
“We know we can initiate additional services quickly – and that Bell has the depth and breadth of capabilities needed to tackle various technology-related challenges. Over the years, they have proved their worth and their business integrity. In it for the long term – we know they care about our business just as much as we do.”
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