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Bandwidth on the Cheap
Drive west from Denver, and the Rocky Mountains loom across the horizon, a pleasant distraction from the dull office parks fringing the outskirts of towns such as Longmont, the headquarters for most of Sunrise's back-office operations. Although corporate headquarters is officially in Carlsbad, Calif., IT and other support units are housed in Colorado, the administrative hub for 3,500 employees spread across 11 manufacturing sites in Europe and North America.
"We might be located in Longmont, Colorado, but we try to think globally," says Cooper.
It wasn't always that way. Cooper inherited 17 data centers, some linked with 56k connections. But in the wake of the dot-com bust, Sunrise was able to upgrade its network on the cheap.
"Before there was a datacom barrier for a midsized company to manage IT from a central location," says Cooper. "After the e-business crash, we were positioned great."
Moving to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Sunrise was able to host its own communications, eliminating 50-cent-per-minute phone calls and $5,000 videoconferences.
"The stars aligned," Cooper says. "The business strategy that evolved here was the catalyst, coming together with the cost of bandwidth and hardware savings."
Cooper spent two years standardizing the company's network. Each country had its own vendors and gear. Sunrise was running more than 500 IT systems and 13 ERP systems, each with its own database. Just figuring out how to centrally pay for IT services from headquarters was a chore.
"Our finance department didn't know how to handle that," Kirkpatrick says. "How do you approve a global project? Who signs for it? Does every single country have to approve? There was no process."
Fact-finding helped.
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