Centurylink Technology Solutions helps Japan’s largest airline cut costs, enhance performance and increase scalability of its corporate websites.

1. OVERVIEW
Centurylink Technology Solutions helps Japan’s largest airline
cut costs, enhance performance and increase scalability of its
corporate websites.
Established in 1952 to restore Japanese air transportation services disrupted
by World War II, All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd. (ANA) has grown steadily over the
past almost 60 years to build a strong international business that in fiscal 2010
reaped revenues of US $14.6 billion. With the largest route network in Japan,
ANA controls almost half of Japan’s domestic passenger market by revenue, and
has been consistently rated top-class in quality, customer satisfaction and value
creation among all Japanese air carriers. ANA also wholly or primarily owns a lot
of transportation companies, including Air Nippon, Air Next and Air Japan, which
in aggregate operate as the ANA Group.
CHALLENGE
Website hosting and management for all ANA Group companies was traditionally
performed internally by ANA’s information technology (IT) department. But the
monthly updates required to keep the more than 90 websites functioning reliably
and at top performance consumed significant time and money — resources that
ANA wanted to devote to other, more strategic IT tasks.
CUT COSTS, ENHANCE
PERFORMANCE AND
INCREASE SCALABILITY
ALL N MANAGED SERVICES IPPON AIRWAYS CO. LTD. (ANA)
AT A GLANCE
INDUSTRY:
Biotechnology
LINE OF BUSINESS:
Cancer treatments
TARGET MARGET:
Global
LOCATION:
Seattle, WA
Transportation
Air passenger and freight transport
Worldwide leisure and business
travelers, and businesses
shipping products from Japan to
both domestic and international
destinations
LOCATION:
Global
CENTURYLINK SOLUTIONS:
Managed Web Hosting,
Managed Network, and
Managed Security solutions
SUMMARY:
ANA Group chose CenturyLink to
host and manage more than 90
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For more information about CenturyLink Technology Solutions, visit www.centurylink.com/technology.
In fact, ANA found its internal resources stretched so thin that
“it was not possible to build necessary infrastructure and im-plement
new technologies in a timely manner,” said Mashahiro
Tsukiji, assistant manager of technology and architecture for
ANA’s information technology services department.
“When manufacturers were no longer able to support their
older products, it was extremely valuable to have Savvis
[CenturyLink] behind us because it was very difficult to do this
using our internal capabilities alone, said Tsukiji.
Additionally, said Tsukiji, ANA needed more operational
flexibility when it came to provisioning new servers. “When a
server reached capacity and ANA needed to buy a new server,
ANA was able to add more capacity quickly to support our
business needs. This was difficult to do in-house,” he said.
Finally, ensuring higher levels of availability and enhancing
security were both top priorities.
SOLUTION
After much internal debate, ANA decided to outsource hosting
and management of its dozens of websites to an external firm.
Tsukiji’s team performed in-depth evaluations of Japan’s major
IT outsourcers based upon the level and quality of services
they offered. CenturyLink was the only non-Japanese vendor
chosen to be part of this elite list, and was chosen because of
its global presence, technological innovation — including its
leadership in cloud computing — and cost competitiveness.
Under the contract, CenturyLink provides an IT cloud infra-structure
solution that supports ANA’s corporate sites across
90 domains. In addition to deploying CenturyLink’s managed
hosting services, ANA depends on CenturyLink’s managed
security services — including network intrusion detection and
managed firewalls — as well as its managed network ser-vices,
to keep its websites available and high performing.
Because it had recently expanded its Tokyo data center by
3,700 square feet of raised floor space, CenturyLink was
able to accommodate ANA’s requirements in addition to the
increasing demand for cloud and hosted IT infrastructure
solutions by CenturyLink customers throughout the region.
BENEFITS
CenturyLink’s hosting services have enabled ANA to rapidly
scale the infrastructure for its corporate websites as needed.
“All this allows us to meet our enterprise-level requirements
much more effectively,” said Tsukiji. For example, take storage
scalability, he said. “The amount of data needed by ANA
Group users increases, and in the past it was very challenging
to keep up with demand,” he said. “Today, we can easily add
system resources, including storage, in a flexible manner,
which is very beneficial to our company.”
Keeping ANA websites available has also improved dramati-cally.
With CenturyLink’s managed hosting solution in place,
ANA can perform system backups without shutting down
servers or slowing down performance. “In the past, system
maintenance was an issue — we had such limited staff that it
was difficult to do on a timely basis,” said Tsukiji. “Users are
very satisfied that because system maintenance is performed
regularly, they can always access the sites they need.”
Most importantly, “choosing Savvis [CenturyLink] has
enabled our IT team to move away from the day-to-day
operation and management of IT infrastructure for the ANA
Group’s corporate sites and instead focus on core business
initiatives,” said Tsukiji.
FUTURE
Looking forward, ANA is eager to investigate other
CenturyLink offerings, especially the CenturyLink Cloud Data
Center (CDC) solution with multi-tiered security and quality
of service (QoS) levels which would help ANA achieve even
greater flexibility, scalability, and cost savings.
“Because IT is such a critical function for the airline indus-try,
it makes sense to utilize advanced technologies like
Savvis’ [CenturyLink’s] cloud solutions to run our business
better,” said Tsukiji.
corporate sites. As a result, ANA has achieved
greater performance, availability, scalability, and
speed-to-market of new content and capabilities
for its websites — all at a lower cost than doing it
internally.
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