GHY International

Nigel Fortlage

Vice President of Information Technology

GHY International

GHY International was founded in 1901 by George Henry Young. We are an international trade services firm that provides services for commercial enterprises that deal with international trade movement between Canada and the US primarily.

The real-time on demand world has forced us to look at using the technology at our disposal to enable delivery from not only our internal customers but also our external customers.

That has ultimately manifested itself in leveraging solutions that have not only benefited the inside operations of the organization and thereby reducing our operating costs, but has also enabled us to open up and provide new service offerings to our customers.

The main issue was that IT was so tied up in itself in managing the server environment we couldn't focus on the business, which is the end game. We knew in the business where we wanted to be but in IT we didn't...again we were so busy doing it that we didn't have time to actually figure out where we should be.

And this gave us an opportunity to focus on that. In reality, that's all it boils down to, was that we followed the recommendations that we were given by turning to a partner who was able to deliver. And that's what IBM did for us.

The most exciting part is when you're able to refocus on the business and move away from the technology for technology sake.

Virtualization and optimization have really manifested themselves with surprises because we're doing an integrated environment. We're not talking a whole virtualized Windows environment or a whole virtualized LINUX. We're talking AIX, LINUX, Windows and OS400 all under the covers. All at the same time. All in one box.

We now were able to focus on the business and in doing that it's manifested itself in a number of ways. Probably the first and most exciting for us was the fact that in the first year of business of operating that, we saw a nine-month payback on the entire project.

Some examples and especially in the use of the open environment was that we were able to take our data communications and reduce an ongoing cost of $60,000 a year in data communication costs just for our branch to branch communications.

Given the volume of spam that our corporation receives and that our security policy -- which is an open source based policy -- maintains, the amount of spam e-mail that we do not deliver to our end users is saving the company approximately $40,000 a year based upon today's numbers.

We've leveraged other open source tools for initiatives for our forms development, and we have leveraged these tools significantly where the cost offset in the first implementation alone was an $80,000 benefit to GHY.

The largest aspect of gaining time has really allowed us to, of course, focus on our business and those customers. And that's for both our internal and external customers. But more importantly that through our virtualized environment we are able to leverage that to make it into a responsive environment using our virtualization technologies.

We're able to go back and focus on what will make the business better as we open it up because really the transition today is to go from that sort of back office support environment of IT being the engine to the business to IT being an enabler to the business and in fact open it up to market to create customer centric, customer focused applications. And that's really what we see in front of us as a really great opportunity.