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Growing Australian global IT company Empired looks to a private Telco, ACSData, for their global internet services.

Announcement posted by ACS Data PTY Ltd 01 Jun 2016

Growing an IT solutions provider from 140 staff in Australia to almost 1000 employees globally within 4 years is no mean feat.   It has been a long and complicated task for the Empired IT team, led by Paul Cina, to help bring the 5 disparate organisations and associated infrastructure together into a cohesive company.  The acquisitions, in line with the company’s focus on Microsoft based solutions for corporate and government customers across Australia, has now taken Empired to a global stage with acquired offices located in New Zealand, the USA and 5 cities around Australia.
The consolidation and office rationalisation required posed some challenges for the team in terms of ensuring constant connectivity and communication for the customers, the new and existing staff as well as to their Data Centres, SaaS providers and Microsoft.  Suddenly faced with multiple telecommunications (ISP and WAN) providers, varying contract terms and lengths combined with administration of the mottled services not only posed challenges to the budget but also the integrity of their services.
With these disparate links from multiple providers, Paul and his team knew that they would have to consolidate and do so in line with the facilities and management of the mergers.  The IT team used AGILE methodology to plan and execute to their strategy, splitting the requirements into mini-projects to ensure service continuity. Paul and his team knew they needed to standardise their network and ensure that their communication and connectivity strategy was repeatable and re-deployable as they move offices and grow the business.  Taking into consideration an increased use of SAAS and PAAS, Empired would require a provider that was well connected to other cloud- vendors and could ensure a smooth transition to the cloud. 
Whilst the need for Express Route was not immediate, it was forecasted and added to the list of requirements for the new provider.  Having moved from ISDN to SIP trunks meant the new provider must also be reliable with full redundancy through true diversity to ensure 100% uptime for their Service Desk telephony. 
Whilst reviewing the existing ISP and WAN providers for Empired and the acquisitions, they were introduced to ACSData, the provider of global redundant and diverse ISP and WAN services for their most recent acquisition, Intergen.  Intergen’s satisfaction with the services provided by ACSData, including BGP routing, QoS and the low latency connectivity to Microsoft in the US and Australia meant ACSData would be a consideration as the ISP provider for the rest of the new Empired offices.  With the project complexity and cost savings in mind, Empired’s IT and finance team wanted to ensure they were going to get “the best bang for buck in their new relationship”.
After a full analysis of possible Telecoms partners, ACSData was chosen as the ISP provider for all the Empired offices. The ACSData network engineers began work with Paul and the team to provide a seamless cutover from the disparate providers and links to the newly designed, repeatable and re-deployable connectivity solution.  Despite the varied contracts and co-ordination with the facilities amalgamation and staff movements, the cut over for all the offices took less than 12 months.    With excellent planning in conjunction with ACSData, Empired were able to mitigate any major risks ahead of time and ensured no outages during the execution. The only challenge came as the IT team realised they urgently required incremental IPV4 addresses for one of the new locations.  Working with the ACSData team, this was resolved within 24 hours.
“Working with ACSData has ensured our staff and customers benefit from fast, reliable links, enabling our business to not only function more efficiently, but also service our customers more effectively.  ACSData is a vendor that looks out for our needs and is responsive. “Paul Cina, IT Manager, Empired.
 
About Empired Ltd (ASX:EPD):
Empired Ltd is a national IT Services Provider with a broad range of capabilities and a reputation for delivering enterprise class IT service and solutions. Establish in 1999, Empired is a publicly listed company (ASX: EPD) formed in Western Australia and with offices nationally.
With a combined team of over 900 people located in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide, New Zealand and the US, Empired has built a reputation for service excellence and is a leading provider of business technology solutions to both government and private sectors. The Empired team work with clients to deliver high quality solutions to meet their business requirements.
The flexible service delivery approach and “can do” attitude has enabled Empired to secure clients that range from medium size entities through to large enterprise accounts with services delivered across Australia, South East Asia and beyond.
 
About ACS Data PTY Ltd:
ACSData was established in 1999, in Wellington, New Zealand with a view to providing technology and services to their customers based on the mantra of “doing things the right way – first time”.  Now with Telecommunications services spanning Australia, USA, the UK and New Zealand ACSData has grown to provide corporate and government customers low latency, fully diverse redundant SaaS, Cloud and inter-office connectivity and related services around the globe.