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Horizon Solutions is anything but the new kid on the block when it comes to the electrical and industrial distribution space. In fact, just the opposite is true; the company has a rich 150-year heritage of providing applications and commercial goods to OEMs, commercial institutions, contractors and machine builders, among other customers. The company’s roots can be traced back to 1857 when it originally sold to blacksmith wagon makers. In May of 2000, through the merger of Holmes Distributors of Portland, Maine; Oakes Electric of Holyoke, Massachusetts; and Rero Distribution of Rochester, New York, the Horizon that exists today was formed. The company currently boasts eight branches across upstate New York and New England and has emerged as an applications expert in electrical and industrial distribution. Thanks to its technical, supply chain and business knowledge acumen, Horizon has been able to reduce costs, increase throughput and accelerate time to market for its clients.

“Though we actually sell products, what we have paid a lot of attention to in recent years is finding ways to add value to our portfolio of goods by adding services,” said Don Harrington, Executive VP, Commercial, Institutional and Municipal Division (CIM) at Horizon Solutions. “We do that by working with our customers intimately to learn their business to find ways to bring success to them through our technical abilities, training opportunities and supply chain services.”

A GROWING COMPANY

As the company blossomed to 250 employees with mul-tiple locations, it started to experience the infrastruc-ture growing pains that most burgeoning businesses eventually encounter. Horizon has since reorganized its distribution method to use a central distribution and fulfillment center in Albany, New York, and upgraded or moved nearly all its branches. To support its far-ranging business, the company had a mix of physical and virtu-al machines scattered across the enterprise, meaning there was little uniformity across the bases. So, in 2012, Horizon built a new data center.

“We had some virtualization going on, but it was ad hoc,” explained John Miller, Horizon’s director of IT.

“We had Windows servers of every flavor and it was

very difficult to manage. We were perennially short on storage space, CPU capabilities, RAM—everything that indicates an end point for an infrastructure as opposed to a beginning or a sustainable infrastructure.”

INFRASTRUCTURE WOES

Faced with a legacy infrastructure incapable of supporting Horizon’s rapid growth, the company began to experience a number of outages and downtime of individual servers and services. As a result, Horizon wasn’t in a position to upgrade and stay current, according to Miller. In fact, the company was grappling with several issues limiting its progress:

• It was several versions behind in desktop OS and office suites.

• It was constrained with regards to email storage capacity; as a result, employees had to get “creative” in finding ways to store their email on their laptops or desktops, Miller said.

• The company couldn’t upgrade SharePoint as it didn’t have the physical resources necessary to perform more than just small individual changes.

A LONG PARTNERSHIP

To help facilitate its infrastructure upgrade project and geographic relocation, Horizon turned to long-time business contact, and trusted vendor, Atrion. Horizon first started working with Atrion in the late ’90s when a number of former DataComm Services employees left to go work at Atrion.

“We followed many of those employees to Atrion because Atrion attracted and retained the kind of people with whom we prefer to engage,” Harrington said. “Atrion has a similar business model to ours and, after being introduced to their employees, we found that they emulate the type of company which we like to do business with.”

The first engagement Horizon had with Atrion involved network monitoring and maintenance. Then, over the years, the company enlisted the help of the IT services firm for everything from moving from Bay networks to Cisco networks to migrating from PSTN telephony to VoIP.

HORIZON SOLUTIONS TAPS ATRION FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, FLEXPOD PROJECT

“Though we actually sell products, what we have paid a lot of attention to in recent years is finding ways to add value to our portfolio of goods by adding services.”

Don Harrington

Executive VP, Commercial,

Institutional and Municipal

Division (CIM) ,

Horizon Solutions

AN ATRION CLIENT CASE STUDY

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“We’ve done a little bit of everything over the years,” Harrington added. With this specific infrastructure upgrade, Atrion handled sourcing Horizon’s voice and data circuits as well as designing a migration plan that Horizon could use to have the new facility up and running quickly with little to no disruption to the business. Atrion also provided the following services:

• Installing new Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects, chassis and blades• Installing new NetApp storage solution• Setting up the Cisco 4900 series switches• Configuring virtualization hosts

Atrion helped integrate these FlexPod components into Horizon’s infrastructure. Doing so enabled Horizon to “radically refresh” its environment, according to Miller. The offering has allowed Horizon to migrate Exchange from 2007 to 2013, upgrade Lync to 2013, and enjoy a new SharePoint site. It also has set the foundation for their hybrid expansion to Office 365 (currently in progress).

“From an IT perspective, we wouldn’t have been able to do without the FlexPod resources and what it brought to the table in terms of storage with lots of heavy de-duplication, processor and RAM resources,” Miller said.

“Technically speaking, Horizon wouldn’t have been able to deploy FlexPod by itself—no way,” he added. “So what Atrion brought to the table right away was capabilities that we didn’t have.”

LOOKING FORWARD

For Horizon, the partnership with Atrion may be more than two decades old but the surface has just been scratched as far as working together goes. For Harrington, what continues to impress him about Atrion—aside from the actual services the company offers and the people it employs—is the fact that Atrion cares about its customers.

“They know what they are doing and they are competent, but they are also warm and understand their business and care for our relationship,” he said. “I’ve never felt when doing business with Atrion that I would be conscribed by the phrasing in a contract as opposed to the spirit of a contract. I have always felt that their employees are genuinely interested in our business and our success—not just their business and their success.”

“I’ve been impressed over the years and frankly somewhat jealous that from the top down, they live and breathe that culture,” he said. “With them, you get what you pay for.”

Echoing a sentiment similar to Harrington’s, Miller added that Atrion’s technical aptitude also stands out among other vendors. The Atrion bench is deep and if the first person doesn’t know the answer to a question there is someone right after them ready with the solution, according to Miller.

“It’s a long relationship that we’ve had and we’ve had it because they always come through and deliver for us and treat us like a valued partner and not a revenue account,” Miller said. “They are much more interested in resolving the issue than closing the ticket.”