Customer

Canadians love the outdoors, and many rely on Suzuki products to help them enjoy various recreational pursuits. Japan-based Suzuki Motor Company, founded Suzuki Inc, (Suzuki) in 1973 to primarily focus on motorcycle sales, but the product line was soon expanded. Today, the Suzuki brand is well known to Canadian consumers for high-quality motorcycles, ATV's, and marine outboard motors.

Challenge

Suzuki has always strived to provide "value-packed products", and the company's focus on quality and value is present in all aspects of its business operations. So, when aging technology systems started causing challenges for the Canadian office - such as inefficient communications with its US headquarters, the inability to conduct day-to-day operations in an agile way, and difficulty in keeping pace with business growth - Suzuki started to consider an infrastructure refresh.

Solution

To help themselves make the best decision to help solve their business challenge, Suzuki conducted face-to-face meetings followed by consultations with each technical team to discuss the general architecture and design approach. Mehmet Unal, Suzuki's Manager of IT saw Sentia's potential right away. "Right from the start, Sentia's approach set them apart from other vendors," he said. "Whether we had questions about an application, software, hardware, network, security, or downstream process change requirement, Sentia was able to provide immediate, accurate information."

Sentia's networking experts assessed Suzuki's existing environment, then designed a server and storage solution that would support the business' current and future needs. The server and storage refresh included a SAS-based IBM Storwize data storage system, Lenovo x86 servers, VMware ESXi (purpose-built bare-metal hypervisor), backup and replication software, and firewalls.

The Sentia team essentially became one with Suzuki's IT group, working evenings and weekends to accomodate stringent corporate requirements, such as zero downtime for users.

The end-to-end solution has provided Suzuki with significant benefits including:

• Accelerated ability to respond to business change
• Increased security and reliability
• Modernized communications backbone
• Improved backup capabilities

Highlights

• Suzuki gains a trusted technology advisor they can rely on for fresh ideas and honest, expert guidance.
• Suzuki's modernized IT infrastructure is fast and reliable, delivering greater efficiencies and virtually zero downtime.
• The technology refresh enables Suzuki to maintain quality standards and continue to deliver premium products to the market.

"Google knows everything - well so does Sentia's networking team. They truly became members of our IT group and went above and beyond to ensure the project ran seamlessly."

- Mehmet Unal,
Suzuki Canada Inc.