Backup and Restore, Email Archiving, e-Discovery, and Client Management

Executive Summary

Overview
Mitel is a provider of communications solutions for large and small organizations. With 3,000 employees, 1,500 partners and value-added resellers, and operations in over 90 countries, Mitel’s IT systems are critical to maintaining efficient operations. As the telecommunications industry shifts towards a new era of value-added, IP-based business communications solutions, Mitel needs every operating advantage it can accumulate, including optimal and strategic support from its IT operations.

Barriers
Backup solutions for Mitel’s servers were fragmented, with a variety of solutions and storage environments in place. Email discovery was an ongoing manual operation that siphoned off IT staff time and incurred significant budget expenditures to third-party email discovery service providers. Storage costs for email were also expected to grow dramatically, and Mitel wanted to avoid those expenditures as well as reduce the risk of not having ready-access to important email messages. On a different note, with significant revenue growth and various acquisitions, the lack of visibility into the company’s hardware and software inventory was lacking. Software patch management, recovery of data from crashed computers, deployment of new software, and imaging of new and rebuilt computers were all manual, time-consuming processes. Mitel’s leaders knew that improving these IT functions would strengthen overall operations, enhance employee productivity, and improve the bottom line.

The Solution
In order to address these challenges, Mitel embarked on several IT initiatives. First, for backup and recovery, the Mitel IT team implemented Veritas NetBackup. It provides the team with a centralized administrative console across a highly heterogeneous server and storage environment. Second, for client management, which includes asset and inventory management, the IT team implemented a series of different Altiris software solutions, including Client Management Suite, Asset Management Suite, and Inventory Solution. Finally, the Mitel team deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault for email archiving and e-discovery. They concurrently rolled out an email retention policy and subsequently embarked on a nine-month initiative that combined PST ingestion with employee training.

Benefits
A Total Operational & Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group found the different solutions from Symantec are driving more than $8.0 million in realized and projected business value in labor productivity gains, cost savings, and cost avoidance for Mitel.

• Backup Labor Productivity Cost Avoidance Savings: $806,643 in realized and projected labor savings through improved backup productivity from January 2005 through December 2009
• Backup Troubleshooting Labor Savings: $510,184 in realized and projected labor savings through improved backup troubleshooting capabilities from January 2005 through December 2009
• PST-Related Labor Productivity Savings: $2,640,018 in realized and projected labor savings for end users who no longer need to deal with PST files and other email-related issues from May 2006 through December 2009
• Email Storage Savings: $242,945 in avoided costs (realized and projected) for email storage from May 2006 to December 2009
• Email Search Labor Productivity Savings: $3,614,022 in realized and projected labor productivity savings for end users due to faster email search capabilities from May 2006 through December 2009
• Asset Management Labor Savings: $324,366 in realized and projected labor savings related to more efficient computer asset management from January 2007 to December 2009
• Patch Management Labor Savings: $152,642 in realized and projected labor savings from automated application and operating system patch management from January 2007 to December 2009
• Third-Party Data Recovery Service Savings: $11,400 in realized and projected cost avoidance savings by not sending crashed