Friday, January 20, 2012

Avanade: Nonprofit Saves 20 Percent in Data Center Costs with Cloud Solution

Avanade and Accenture expertise reduces migration costs

Business Situation
The Aidmatrix Foundation has developed a global reputation for helping business, nonprofit, and government partners make a difference in the lives of people around the world. When disaster strikes, organizations in charge of providing humanitarian relief—food, clothes, medical supplies—turn to Aidmatrix for its webbased, supply-chain technology. The company’s solutions cover procurement, warehousing, donation management, transportation, and consulting and are built from the ground up with one goal in mind: to help disaster response organizations deliver aid as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. 

Natural and human-caused disasters follow no agenda, so Aidmatrix must be ready at all times to quickly deliver its solutions to partners anywhere in the world. Unlike typical businesses, demand for the nonprofit’s products follows unpredictable spikes interspersed with periods of relative inactivity. During and immediately following a crisis, demand can reach up to 1,000 times the normal rate. Aidmatrix stays prepared by hosting its solutions in three data centers across the United States and one in England.

“We have to maintain a certain level of assets at these data centers to be prepared for any eventuality,” says Michael Ross, Vice President for Delivery at Aidmatrix. “Until recently, outsourcing the management of the physical servers at the data center was an ongoing expense. We paid up front for space and physical infrastructure that we didn’t use all the time. We also paid for server maintenance and for updating our software. We would have preferred to allocate our IT resources toward enhancing our solutions.”

If a crisis occurred where Aidmatrix had no preexisting infrastructure, the company used to go through a long and expensive process of identifying a location to host servers and run its software to help local aid delivery.

Read the full case study from Avanade

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