Customer Solution Case Study
Relocation Company Builds Business on Microsoft Instead of Linux or Novell
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Transportation and Logistics
Customer Profile
Altair Global Relocation is one of the top woman-owned global relocation companies. It is headquartered in the United States, and manages more than U.S.$1 billion in relocation transactions annually.
Business Situation
The company's executives wanted to replace its Novell NetWare environment with a platform that could support scalability, boost the reliability of its business model, and increase customer service levels.
Solution
After evaluating Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Cold Fusion, Altair chose to build its infrastructure on Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003, using the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Benefits
n Increased revenue and net income
n Realized more than 100 percent ROI
n Expanded reporting capabilities
n Developed a flexible architecture
n Improved business model stability / “One of the factors that validates Altair’s decision to choose Windows Server 2003 instead of Linux is that Microsoft technologies support our rapid growth more effectively.”
Gail Plummer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Altair Global Relocation
Altair Global Relocation is one of the largest woman-owned global relocation companies in the United States. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, it manages more than U.S.$1 billion in relocation transactions annually. In 2003, Altair decided to switch from the Novell NetWare platform, primarily because it restricted IT changes. After evaluating Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Cold Fusion, Altair chose Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 for its established products, practices, and partners. BEST CROSSMARK helped the company restructure its IT systems on Windows Server 2003, employing the Microsoft .NET Framework, as well as Microsoft system management tools and messaging applications. Altair has since grown its revenue by 30 percent annually, increased net income by more than 100 percent, accelerated data access, developed a scalable, flexible architecture, and strengthened its business model.
Situation
Formerly known as AmeriCorp, Altair Global Relocation, a woman-owned enterprise headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is one of the largest independent global relocation companies in the United States. Altair serves international organizations including Fortune 500 companies, with employees located throughout the United States and partners around the globe. Altair manages more than U.S.$1 billion in financial transactions supporting global relocations each year. Approximately 50,000 individuals associated with clients and global suppliers access the company’s systems to obtain information about relocations such as service status, performance results, property sales, moving logistics, and expenses.
In 2003, Altair was evaluating a new platform for its computing infrastructure, which consisted largely of legacy applications running on Novell NetWare 4.1. The company’s core relocation management application, a proprietary database system, could not support releases of the Novell NetWare operating system beyond version 4.1, restricting the system’s ability to support newer technologies. Altair’s legacy application offered limited integration with other applications, including the company’s financial system, and did not provide Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directory services. Altair felt that its IT restrictions would impact the stability of its business model in the long-term. Changing software development platforms presented new opportunities to strengthen the company’s infrastructure and business model, allowing for greater levels of data integration, reporting, security, and customization.
“Our customers see information technologies as a differentiating factor between providers,” notes Gail Plummer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Altair Global Relocation. “Before a Fortune 500 company trusts us with its most precious asset, its people, they want to see that we have business continuity plans, people and partner redundancy, and scalable systems capacity.”
The company narrowed its search to two development platforms: The first option was Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Cold Fusion for a development tool, and the second was the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, along with the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system. Ultimately, Altair chose the Microsoft environment. One reason was that the company had previously deployed one of the industry’s first portals on the Windows® 2000 Server operating system. The portal—created using Microsoft Visual Studio version 6.0, Active Server Pages, and the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database—enabled customers to create on-demand reports detailing global service, financial, and logistical information.
Kelly Tepera, Senior Vice President, Information Services, Altair Global Relocation, explains other reasons for choosing Microsoft over Linux, “We could utilize the Microsoft platform and applications to improve efficiency, accuracy, usability, and capitalize on the power of seamless integration of applications in our enterprise. Altair’s business and financial commitment to developing relocation technology solutions for our customers will remain steadfast. We know that Microsoft will have the professionals and product innovations to keep us on the cutting edge.”
Elaborating on the importance of building on technologies that could support the company for the long-term, Jason Beaudreau, Director, Information Technology, Altair Global Relocation notes, “By choosing Microsoft, we knew we would benefit from an established product plan and a prescribed architecture that wouldn’t tie us to any individual developers. We also knew Microsoft and its partners would be around for a long time.”
Security was another key factor in the company’s environment choice. “We were impressed with the entire offering of products, tools, and services that Microsoft could provide,” continues Beaudreau. “The best practice guides that were available with the MSDN® developer program would enable us to build a reliable, stable infrastructure, with less training than if we built on Linux. We also saw Microsoft’s commitment to reviewing and addressing bugs and security issues in an organized manner. This was all so different from Linux. Because there are so many different distributions of Linux, the update systems are wide and varied, which doesn’t work for us.”
Solution
BEST CROSSMARK, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ISO 9001:2000-certified company, had helped Altair develop and expand its portal using Microsoft technologies between 2000 and 2002. Because of the portal’s success, executives at Altair wanted the team—including individuals from both BEST CROSSMARK and Altair—to migrate the company’s legacy applications to Microsoft products. This entailed replacing the company’s financial management application, DataModes TM/4 Solutions, with Microsoft Business Solutions—Solomon, now part of Microsoft Dynamics™. Additionally, Altair would migrate the company’s messaging services from IBM Lotus Notes 5.0 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, which is part of Windows Server System.
"This would be a multi-million dollar project for Altair,” comments Dr. Nand Singh, President, BEST CROSSMARK. “We had to build a robust yet cost-effective system on a platform that would be scalable, extensible and secure to support Altair’s diverse global customer base and keep up with its super normal growth over the next 10 to 15 years."
Developers are using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to convert the company’s legacy application into the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, running on the Windows Server operating system. The .NET Framework is an integral component of Windows that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
Capitalizing on the flexibility of the .NET Framework, developers built in capabilities that would enable their core business system to collect data from various internal and external applications, store it in a data repository, and then provide the data in customizable reports via the portal.
While part of the team worked on the relocation application, others upgraded the portal from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003, and migrated DataModes TM/4 Solutions accounting software to Microsoft Solomon. Last year, the team replaced IBM Lotus Notes 5.0 with Exchange Server 2003, and the Active Directory® directory service. BEST CROSSMARK has continued to work with developers at Altair to dismantle its legacy infrastructure.
Benefits
By migrating its IT infrastructure from disparate legacy applications running on Novell NetWare to tightly integrated applications running on Windows Server 2003, Altair has increased its revenue and net income, realized more than a 100 percent return on investment (ROI), expanded its reporting capabilities, created a flexible, scalable architecture, and developed a stable business model to support growth.
Growing Revenue and Net Income
“Reliable, secure computing technologies play a key role in global relocation, and companies that bring new offerings to market first get noticed,” advises Gary Dittrich, Executive Vice President, Chief Development Officer. “We came to BEST CROSSMARK because we needed a development partner to implement technology solutions that would allow us to compete in our industry, and that’s where we are today. Our technologies open doors and close deals. We are finding that many of our clients chose us because of our customer service, which is supported by our computing infrastructure.”
“One of the factors that validates Altair’s decision to choose Windows Server 2003 instead of Linux is that Microsoft technologies support our rapid growth more effectively,” adds Plummer. “To illustrate how much technology has affected our growth, business revenue is compounding at the rate of 30 percent per year. The company’s revenue growth is on target to double from year-end 2004 to year-end 2007, while the company’s net income will increase fourfold—because of a continued investment in and contribution from our computing systems.”
Realized More than 100 Percent ROI
“Every penny we have put into our solution has come back to us within six months,” notes Tepera. “Our ROI in Microsoft technologies and our partnership with BEST CROSSMARK has been returned in multiples of our initial and on-going investment. BEST CROSSMARK has become our true partner in computing because of the company’s knowledge and efforts. It supplies us with the personnel that have the knowledge to put solutions in place for Altair and its customers.”
Investing in Microsoft products has delivered financial returns in other areas as well. “The modern tools we have from Windows Server 2003, including Active Directory and Exchange Server 2003, have drastically improved the manageability of the whole network,” Beaudreau adds. “As the rest of the company grows, our IT support group can expand at a slower rate.”
The company is continuing to take advantage of the latest offerings from Microsoft. For instance, the development team is currently migrating the portal originally developed using Visual Studio 6.0 to the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
Expanded Reporting Capabilities
Today, Altair delivers one of the industry’s most powerful on-demand reporting mechanisms, enabling customers to get accurate information, when they need it, from any global location—securely. When customers access the portal, they can choose from two types of downloadable reports: custom and user-defined. The custom reports contain information predetermined by the client, in a predefined template. The user-defined reports allow people to collect real-time information from items tracked in the SQL Server database. Customers can create macro- or micro-level views of data, a reporting capability not common in the industry.
Altair regularly exchanges data with its customers’ systems to create reports. Knowing that data is coming from a tested, reliable environment based on the .NET Framework has given customers confidence in Altair’s system.
Developed a Flexible Architecture
When Altair signs on a new client, the development team needs only two to four weeks to customize the system so that it can support the customer’s requirements. One Fortune 500 company recently granted Altair an award for the most customized delivery of a product in the shortest amount of time.
“We can integrate applications and systems 70 percent faster than before, which helps us rapidly support new customers,” notes Tepera. “I think one of the best things about the Microsoft platform is how it has allowed us to evolve—in our technologies and in the way we do business. Our system is flexible enough so that we can implement customer-driven innovation, adding value for our customers.”
Beaudreau elaborates, “We’ve developed every aspect of our solutions to be flexible, through the combination of code-reuse, the presentation layer, and our database-driven configurations. Our on-site consultants from BEST CROSSMARK are also highly skilled. All these things combined translate into very speedy turnaround on change requests and customizations. Thanks to Windows Server 2003 and the .NET Framework, we have integration capabilities that were not possible with our old relocation system.”
Improved Business Model Stability
By building its infrastructure with established Microsoft products and practices, as well as employing services from Microsoft partners such as BEST CROSSMARK, Altair has improved the reliability and security of its business model, enhancing its competitive position in the industry.
“Our technology is one of our core competencies now,” Beaudreau observes. “We maintain our infrastructure by following Microsoft’s recommendations, and we’ve been very successful. We were totally unaffected by the host of destructive worms that plagued the Internet in 2003. We’ve been pleased with Microsoft’s security offerings. It used to be quite a task for our infrastructure team to update machines in our various locations. Technologies like Windows Server Update Services have really streamlined the process.”
“By choosing to build our infrastructure on Microsoft products, we don’t have to worry about losing crucial system information if we lose a developer,” concludes Tepera. “One of the main requirements we had for our new system platform was choosing technologies that would not hold us hostage in any way.
Microsoft stands behind its products, while BEST CROSSMARK provides the solid, knowledgeable technical support we rely on. We pass that feeling of security on to our customers.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem