Founded in 1992, Toronto-based Distributech specialized in handling the direct mail marketing needs for Canada’s top brands. At the time, email and web-based marketing, much less e-commerce, were a few years out. As those innovations began to prove themselves, Distributech began building the needed IT infrastructure to provide its clients with those services, while continuing physical fulfillment operations such as printing, warehousing and mailing.

Fast forward to today: Distributech/InvestorCOM’s business is much larger because more companies have outsourced their marketing communications, financial publishing and e-commerce functions. According to Randy McIver, Vice President of Information Technology, the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) operations growth is fast overtaking its more traditional functions. “Our growth is transformational,” he explains. “We’re quickly building out a set of strong

SaaS offerings from our legacy brick warehouse and print operations. Half our growth is due to these new channels we’ve opened up.”

Time to retire an aging IT infrastructureDistributech offers three SaaS platforms. First is a sophisticated marketing automation web portal called DOXTM, which supports day-to-day e-commerce operations, including order management and fulfillment. Second is InvestorPOSTM to meet the document composition, delivery, compliance and reporting needs of the financial services and insurance industries. Third is Pivotal ContactTM, a data mining, analytics and business intelligence service for marketers.

Each day, Distributech/InvestorCOM’s IT infrastructure handles millions of varied online data transactions. These include e-commerce orders, files sent by a client and data transferred via a web service call. But the existing multi-vendor IT patchwork was falling short of the

Business needWith its SaaS offerings driving growth,

Distributech/InvestorCOM sought

to replace an aging IT patchwork

and boost availability, reduce costs,

improve disaster recovery and

security.

Solution

The company chose an end-to-end

infrastructure solution, almost entirely

virtualized, with components from

Dell’s comprehensive portfolio of

hardware and software, assisted by

Dell Deployment Services.

Benefits• Significantly boosted its

infrastructure availability

• Reduces server footprint by 75

percent

• Lowers energy use by 50 percent

• Saves hundreds of hours a year in

IT staff time

• Gains scalability for future growth

Solutions at a glance• Data Center & Cloud Management

• Data Center Consolidation

• Data Recovery

• Security

• Systems Management

Customer profile

Company Distributech/

InvestorCOM

Industry Media &

Communications

Country Canada

Employees 120

Website distributech.ca

investorcom.com

“Everything from switching to servers to storage, firewalls, and backup, Dell could provide, which greatly simplifies overall IT management and scaling for growth.” Randy McIver, Vice President of Information Technology, Distributech/InvestorCOM

More clicks than bricks drive SaaS provider’s growthAs Distributech/InvestorCOM grew from a traditional marketing and print fulfillment company to a multiplatform SaaS provider, it significantly raised its IT infrastructure availability

2

performance, capacity and data recovery needs of the business. “We were starting to have availability issues and clearly needed to upgrade to newer technology platforms,” says McIver. “At the same time, we needed to simplify and make our IT systems much more efficient to operate and grow.”

Single-sourcing saves months and reduces riskAfter conducting an RFP process that included Cisco, Distributech chose Dell for several reasons, according to McIver. One was that Dell could provide one source for the company’s much-needed refresh of its end-to-end infrastructure, both at its Toronto colocation data center near its headquarters and at another colocated disaster recovery site in a nearby suburb. He says, “Everything from switching to servers to storage, firewalls, and backup, Dell could provide, which greatly simplifies overall IT management and scaling for growth.” Other reasons were Dell’s willingness to share its architectural expertise before the sale to help design the solution; the availability of Dell Deployment Services to implement it all; and a compelling lease-to-own arrangement from Dell Financial Services to help Distributech acquire the solution while conserving capital. “We saved months and a lot of risk in getting our solution designed, deployed and running by using Dell Deployment Services,” McIver says.

Virtualization cuts IT footprint by 75 percentIn its main data center, Distributech installed three Dell PowerEdge R620 servers, two Dell Networking N4024 10GbE Layer 3 switches and one Dell EqualLogic PS6210 storage area network with 18TB of usable capacity. Microsoft Hyper-V was used to virtualize 50

physical servers, with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for administration. It deployed a similar setup at its disaster recovery site for replication and failover.

“Overall we reduced our server footprint by 75 percent and lowered our energy use by 50 percent by virtualizing our systems on Dell PowerEdge servers,” McIver says. “At the same time, we boosted our systems availability significantly. We’re seeing huge performance gains with our new Dell end-to-end infrastructure.”

Raising the bar on data integrity and securityAlso deployed were Dell PowerVault tape backup systems and Dell SonicWALL firewalls. Both provide Distributech/InvestorCOM’s clients with added assurances of data integrity and security. Those clients include Canada’s top banks and other financial institutions for which such assurances are required for regulatory compliance.

McIver also acquired a large number of Dell Latitude laptops for Distributech/InvestorCOM’s executive and sales teams. These powerful yet lightweight models provide users with easy, mobile connectivity to the company’s ERP and CRM systems from just about anywhere. He says, “We’ve standardized on the Dell Latitudes for our laptops across the company, and our desktop fleet includes Dell OptiPlex PCs.”

Management tools help save hundreds of hours a year in IT staff timeOne of the biggest benefits of the new Dell infrastructure has gone to McIver’s infrastructure team that has to manage all the systems. Along with Microsoft System Center for managing the virtual servers, the team uses Dell’s OpenManage Essentials to manage all the Dell hardware,

including servers, storage, networking and SonicWALL firewall appliances. The OpenManage Mobile application also gives them remote, fully mobile access to health status information via any smart device. “We estimate at hundreds of hours of IT time-savings a year,” says McIver. “Morale is so much higher since the team is now doing a lot less firefighting and able to work with some of the latest IT technologies.”

View all Dell case studies at Dell.com/CustomerStories

Dell, the Dell logo, EqualLogic, Latitude, OpenManage, OptiPlex, PowerEdge, PowerVault and SonicWALL are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Availability and terms of Dell Software, Solutions and Services vary by region. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties – express or implied—in this case study. Reference Number: 10022211 © February 2015, Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved

Products & Services

Services

Dell Deployment Services

Dell Financial Services

Dell Support Services

Hardware

Dell EqualLogic PS6210 SAN array

Dell Latitude laptops

Dell Networking N4024 10GbE Layer 3 switches

Dell OptiPlex desktops

Dell PowerEdge R620 servers

Dell PowerVault tape backup

Software

Dell SonicWALL firewall

Dell OpenManage Essentials

Microsoft Hyper-V

OpenManage Integration Suite for Microsoft System Center