BLUEPRINT: RACKSPACE MANAGED HOSTING

THE EFFICIENCY EQUATION
The Building Partner
Rackspace offers a wide range of managed services with proactive service level management, all based on the unique needs of each individual customer. They are the fastest growing managed hosting specialist in the world.

+ Surveying the Project
As Rackspace business continued to grow exponentially, sales administrators were constantly changing or creating monthly contracts in the Microsoft Navision system. Rackspace found there were manual input errors and were continually performing QA of contracts after they were input into the system. Further, new sales administrators were being hired to handle the volume of both changes to existing contracts and creation of new contracts.

+ Drafting the Blueprint
Rackspace needed a system to allow users to create or edit contracts, with an approval workflow so that QA was performed prior to entry into Navision.

+The Microsoft Building Blocks
Rackspace wanted any proposed solution to integrate seamlessly with its existing Navision billing functionality so The Rand Group (TRG) utilized Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office 2003 InfoPath to build the application which would address the business issues. By leveraging XML Web services, TRG was able to exchange the necessary information between the applications, while creating workflow notifications and approvals. With open standards and the focus on communication and collaboration among people and applications, XML Web services was the logical platform for application integration.

+ The Rand Group Expertise
TRG helped Rackspace eliminate data entry errors for changes to existing contracts and creation of new monthly contracts. Further, Rackspace did not have to pay additional user license fees for the new sales administrators to access Navision directly. TRG delivered a scalable solution using SharePoint and InfoPath which Rackspace can now leverage for other business processes.

= Measurable Results
Rackspace estimated their loss of revenue to inaccurate contract input to be material and TRG has been able to help eliminate this significant business issue by deploying other Microsoft technologies. Additionally, implementation of SharePoint and Office 2003 provided Rackspace another reason to migrate to a Microsoft Active Directory to assist their internal IT administrators to better manage their network.