At Firepro Systems, Health and Safety Are of Paramount Importance
What we achieved
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Faster support turnaround
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Licensing cost reduction
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Unified communications
Overview
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Part 1
Challenge
Firepro Systems was looking for a robust collaboration environment along with a dependable messaging infrastructure to enhance employee collaboration and productivity.
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Part 2
Solution
Deploying HCL Domino along with Traveler and Sametime for Collaboration proved to be the perfect solution.
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Part 3
Results
Firepro Systems achieved a unified and reliable communication platform that outpaces other mail solutions in the market. They found Domino to be robust in terms of design, security and function. It takes care of itself for the most part and enables the team to focus on other IT activities.
The Challenge
Firepro Systems’ Story
In many ways, Firepro Systems’ successful track record of almost three decades, speaks for itself. The company has built expertise across numerous functional capacities and provides a full spectrum of solutions in the area of fire detection systems, evacuation systems, fire suppression systems and maintenance services.
In order to maintain their high work standards and competitive lead, they looked for ways to provide their expert team with tools that allowed them to more easily communicate and collaborate. They wanted to streamline and build new efficiencies into their day-to-day operation so their investigation for the right solution ensued.
Firepro Systems’ journey with Domino began in 2007, with version 6.5. Prior to that they used an open-source email solution that was time-consuming to maintain and required a dedicated IT staff to manage. And they found it didn’t scale well as the Firepro Systems team expanded and employees increasingly needed the ability to work from a variety of remote locations. They evaluated another email solution along with HCL Domino.
Mithun Kumar K, Sr IT Manager at Firepro Systems tells the story, “Security, accessibility and reliability were top criteria in our evaluation and selection of a replacement solution. We found that the other solution had some gray areas with respect to security and some data accessibility issues. Domino, on the other hand, was a platform that was proven to be secure, accessible and reliable in design, availability and performance, so our decision to choose Domino as the replacement solution for messaging was an easy and obvious one. From my prior experience I was already well-aware of Domino’s strength as a rock solid, reliable and secure platform.”
Domino takes care of itself and automatically provides log reports that keep my IT team informed of overall system health.
— Mithun Kumar K
IT Manager, Firepro Systems
The Solution
Path to Successful Collaboration
The Domino on-premises solution worked well for the Firepro Systems team for several years and during that time there was one very serious hardware failure — a RAID controller failure, the worst thing which can happen to a server — that took their mail service down for a day, but once the hardware repair was in place the system was brought back up, with no data loss thanks to Domino’s resiliency. This further solidified the Firepro Systems team’s confidence in Domino as the best on-premises messaging solution for them.
A couple of years later they decided to investigate moving their messaging environment to the cloud to lower IT costs, reduce hardware footprint and further streamline their operations. They evaluated two cloud email solutions, including HCL Verse and decided on Verse since Sametime chat was bundled in with the Verse license. With the other solution, the instant messaging capability was an added licensing cost, so Verse became the cost-effective and wise choice. Their trusted business partner, Srivari InfoTech, stepped in to help them every step of the way from license procurement to managing the migration of their data to the cloud, while providing excellent 24x7 support along the way.
Once in the cloud everything worked well, as the day-to-day IT tasks were shifted to the cloud service provider to handle. However, Firepro Systems began to miss the speedy way in which they used to be able to address issues that arose in their on-premises environment and they missed having easy access to data that was now in the cloud. They had become fully dependent on the cloud service Support team to get questions answered and issues addressed. At one point the cloud service was down for 3 days, which meant their Sametime chat function, which the team relied on, was not available. For the Firepro Systems team not being able to collaborate with one another was a big problem, both personally for the employees and from a productivity standpoint. They soon decided to return to their familiar Domino on-premises environment, and once again engaged with Srivari InfoTech (BP) to manage the migration of their cloud data back to Domino on-premises environment.
Domino is a platform that is proven to be secure, accessible and reliable in design, availability and performance, so our decision to choose Domino as our solution for messaging and collaboration was an easy and obvious one.
—Mithun Kumar K
IT Manager, Firepro Systems
The Results
As the IT manager, Mithun Kumar was pleased with reverting to the Domino on-premises environment. Not only were there almost no support tickets submitted but those submitted were minor in nature that could be quickly addressed. No service outages were reported because “Domino takes care of itself,” says Kumar, “by providing log reports if/when Domino needed to take any automatic recovery steps, thereby keeping my IT team informed of overall system health.”
The on-premises Domino mail environment has proven to be very secure and response time faster than their previous cloud solution. Complete control over mobile devices adds convenience and “anytime” access to business information for its employees and increases productivity across the whole organization. The IT team has been able to substantially reduce turnaround time on support requests And notable licensing cost reduction has been achieved in comparison to what competitive products would have cost.
Also, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Firepro Systems employees mostly work from home, so Firepro Systems added a VPN layer to provide greater security when employees access company information and each other, with Sametime Chat, from home, giving the IT team added peace of mind.
Regarding HCL’s recent acquisition of the suite of collaboration solutions — including Domino, Sametime and Traveler — from IBM, Firepro Systems felt the product move to HCL was extremely smooth, with excellent support from HCL and Srivari, throughout the transition. Firepro Systems has also been pleased to see the continued delivery of new product version releases - Domino v10, v10.0.1, v11 and v11.0.1 – from HCL since they took ownership, with positive attention, vision and strategy for continued business growth conveyed at the HCL Executive level.
Looking ahead, Firepro Systems is planning their Domino upgrade from v10.0.1 to V11.0.1 and are excited to explore the new video conferencing capabilities in the upcoming release of Sametime.
About the company
Firepro Systems is a leader in the Infrastructure Protection and Security (IPS) space and offers integrated services and solutions such as fire alarm and detection, fire suppression, access control, video surveillance, intrusion alarm, building management systems, consumer safety and security along with complete managed services.
About the business partner
Srivari Infotech is a software repository for solutions consulting, implementation and also provides comprehensive portfolio of solutions for the most challenging technologies. They provide cutting-edge solutions for the next generation business who are striving to become market pioneers in the competitive world.
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