SABRELINER: A CUSTOM HOSTING CASE STUDY

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Sabreliner is a diversified aviation services company that is recognized worldwide for keeping older aircraft flying and supporting new aircraft production. When Sabreliner decided to outsource the hosting of their IT services, they turned to Connectria for support. Learn more about why Sabreliner transitioned to a hosted infrastructure model and how Connectria supports their day to day business operations.

About Sabreliner

Sabreliner is a privately held aviation services company that is recognized worldwide for keeping older aircraft flying and supporting new aircraft production. Their manufacturing experience began a half a century ago as the OEM of the military T-39 and the civilian Sabreliner business jet. During the first two decades of the business jet era, when the organization was part of the Sabreliner Division of North America and later of Rockwell International, the people of Sabreliner assembled more than 400 Sabreliner business jets.

The company's development is still accelerating today, and they continue to build upon their strong manufacturing backbone. Some of Sabreliner’s customers are the biggest names in aviation, such as Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. They are a specialty supplier to other aviation organizations and to the U.S. Military. Sabreliner manufactures airframe assemblies, parts, components, and tooling used in aircraft production and repair. They remain the primary OEM facility for maintaining the 200+ Sabreliner fleet that is still in operation today. Sabreliner has its corporate headquarters in Clayton, Missouri, with three additional operating facilities throughout Missouri.

Sabreliner Challenges

A little over ten years ago, Sabreliner began to restructure the manner in which IT services were provided to the organization. At that time, all network administration and IT services were completely outsourced. Sabreliner employees obtained required equipment and support through a third party. This created employee disruptions and downtime, which was something Sabreliner wanted to avoid. At the same time, Sabreliner was also hosting their mainframe system internally, a task that they thought would be more appropriately outsourced.

Sabreliner was concerned over maintaining the reliability and stability surrounding the IT infrastructure that supported its business critical applications. They eventually concluded that they’d be better served hosting this environment rather than running it in-house.

Sabreliner launched a search to find a hosting provider to manage and monitor their legacy mainframe system, as well as provide back up and disaster recovery support. They were looking for a facility that provided stability, both in power supply and environment, and reliability to ensure downtime was minimized. They felt that the support a 3rd party hosting vendor could provide far exceeded the environment they could provide at their facilities internally. Hosting their business critical applications would also allow Sabreliner to focus upon better serving its internal business clients.

Choosing Connectria

In Sabreliner's search for a managed hosting provider, they focused in on a few small local companies near their corporate headquarters. They did research a large telecommunications provider, but felt that they would not receive the one on one attention that they may get from a smaller hosting provider. They followed carefully constructed criteria for making this important business decision.

• Reference checks and customer recommendations from other companies already using the services of the hosting provider
• Location of data centers where business critical information would be hosted
• Expert knowledge around the technologies the provider would be supporting

Sabreliner made a point to check references of all vendors that they were looking at for supporting their systems. They felt it was important to conduct this research and gain honest feedback from others. As Sabreliner investigated Connectria’s current clients, they found many satisfied customers. Seeing other large companies within the Missouri area pleased with Connectria’s hosting services, and trusting them with their critical business applications, Sabreliner decided to partner with them as well.

The strict environmental guidelines that Connectria’s data centers abide by were very important in Sabreliner choosing them as their hosting vendor. Connectria runs data centers in Saint Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and utilizes redundant industrial environmental conditioning units to control the data center environments. The backup generators power the units in the event of a commercial power failure, ensuring the environments are controlled even in an emergency situation.

Sabreliner the stability we value. We’ve developed a comfortable relationship over the years with the Connectria team, and we know we can count on them when required.” Sabreliner recently migrated to an Oracle based ERP solution. Connectria assisted in the transition and will continue to support Sabreliner’s new ERP system in the future.

To learn more about Connectria and our Custom Hosting solutions, please visit:
http://www.connectria.com/hosting/custom_hosting.php

To learn more about our Microsoft Exchange Hosting services, please visit:
http://www.connectria.com/technologies/exchange_hosting.php

To learn more about Sabreliner, please visit
www.sabreliner.com



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