Customer Experiences

Goss International - SAP

Goss International rolls through successful SAP migration, thanks to Logicalis and itelligence.

• Best cost-to-risk ratio of all solutions considered
• Rapid, seamless migration to different data center
• Comprehensive management services that reduce business risks
• Dependable technical support at every stage
• 24x7 SAP support

The Client
Goss International, headquartered in Bolingbrook, Illinois, manufactures advanced press and post-press equipment for newspapers and commercial web printing companies. Goss is widely known in the industry for its advanced technology and a 120-year heritage of precision and performance. The company's manufacturing facilities in America, Asia and Europe are supported by a network that spans the globe.

The Challenges
When new owners took control of Goss early in 2005, they quickly grasped their first order of business. "Step one was to transition our existing data center (to a Goss facility) and migrate data from a legacy SAP environment to a new SAP implementation," says Michael Masters, Manager - Systems Developer at Goss.

The requirement was to upgrade the SAP system to 4.7 during the migration and add all new hardware.

The real challenge was to keep the system flowing smoothly. "SAP is our lifeblood," says Masters. "Any downtime whatsoever has an adverse affect, but extended downtime is a business risk we will not take."

"We knew we needed an experienced SAP and infrastructure partner," he says.

The Solution
Even though previous ownership had excellent results with EMC and HP hardware from Logicalis, the new management team considered several potential partners in their RFP process.

"In the end, we selected the firm that offered the best cost-to-risk ratio and the one with the proven ability to deliver the infrastructure and SAP application support we needed," says Masters.

That winning solution was the joint effort of Logicalis and itelligence, a full-service SAP provider. The project involved:

• SAP upgrade managed by itelligence
• HP-UX deployment
• Storage
• SAN connectivity and management between two separate sites for offsite replication and failover
• Managed Services to provide SAP Infrastructure/Application Installation
• Migration and 24x7 ongoing support of the new SAP environment

Management had projected the SAP migration to take three days, but it was completed by itelligence in a less than half the time. "It all went very smoothly," says Masters. "We had a demanding timeframe and the planning and execution went well."

And as for the entire project, Master adds: "From start to finish–it took just six months. This is phenomenal. Lots of providers would have signed up for it, but Logicalis actually made it happen."