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Omniture is a leading provider of online business optimisation software, delivered to customers through hosted, on-demand services. In Q4 2006 alone, Omniture captured data on more than 420 billion transactions, and saw a revenue increase of 86 percent over the previous year. Because of this rapid growth, Omniture needs the consistency, quality and reliability that a company like HP can provide.
Looking to consolidate its server environment, the company began working with HP approximately four years ago. Currently, more than 7,000 of Omniture’s 10,000 servers in its seven global data centres are HP ProLiants. “The HP ProLiant server line is the backbone of our business and the primary server of choice for our company,” says Brandon Pulsipher, VP of Network Operations for Omniture.
Improving repair times
In its old environment, Omniture experienced excessively long turnaround times for equipment repair. If the projected turnaround time was days or weeks, Omniture was forced to purchase replacement hardware. In an environment of 7,000 servers, having 20 to 30 servers to repair or replace is a significant expense.
“There were some areas of our hardware processes that we wanted to improve, specifically repair turnaround times,” says Pulsipher. “We were still delivering on our service objectives, but it was getting more and more challenging to keep up. HP really helped us improve our time to repair. We can now get servers fixed and ready to go in a matter of hours. It also helps that many of our IT professionals are HP certified, so we can handle a large portion of the repairs internally. We have altered our service and repair processes quite drastically since partnering with HP.”
HP helps Omniture deliver on core priorities
Omniture’s three core IT priorities include scalability, reliability and value. Prior to working with HP, scaling quickly was more challenging because each vendor had its own lead time on equipment. HP is able to deliver equipment to any of Omniture’s worldwide data centres rapidly because of the global scope of its business. In one instance, Omniture ordered servers for its Dallas location, and HP built and shipped them in a matter of hours, as opposed to several weeks.
“HP is there for us – for the equipment we’ve bought before and the hardware we’re buying now. That assurance is a huge advantage as we look at deeper global expansion. If we have to carry inventory or capacity, that means additional costs for us. But if we’re able to order capacity at the last minute and get it when we need it, it helps tremendously. And HP has been able to deliver every time,” says Pulsipher.
In terms of reliability, not having to chase down servers and repair status has freed up time to deliver value to the business. The IT team can now focus more on strategic issues. “HP works really closely with us to help us optimise our environment appropriately for our customers and applications,” says Pulsipher. “We purchase a lot of servers from HP, but we spend a lot of time discussing server consolidation. Other providers would probably be quite hesitant to broach the topic for fear of losing business, but HP, as our partner, wants to help us build our business in the most effective and cost-efficient way possible.”
Not only has working with HP helped Omniture improve certain hardware-related processes, it has elevated Omniture’s customer perceptions as well. “The HP brand goes a long way for us,” notes Pulsipher. “Our current customers and prospects are looking for the leaders in technology. They expect us to be supporting our environment with industry leading servers. Many of our customers are using HP servers, so they have the brand recognition as well as the ability to validate the reliability with their internal IT teams. It’s a huge selling point for us.”
Omniture anticipates continued aggressive growth into 2007, and feels confident that HP will support its rapid expansion. “We are targeting approximately 60 percent revenue growth over 2006, which means data capture on bigger volumes of transactions. But we know our environment can handle it. HP makes sure we have the equipment we need, functioning as we need it. So we can focus on supporting the business as it grows.”
HP is an Omniture customer.
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