Tag Archives: Achieves

SoftLayer Replaces Budgeting Software with Alight Planning, Achieves Significant ROI

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El Dorado Hills, CA (PRWEB) June 27, 2012

Alight Planning, developers of the first solution to make driver-based planning easy, today announced SoftLayer has achieved significant benefits by replacing their legacy budgeting and planning software with the Alight Planning solution. The full story was featured in a webinar earlier this month with the Institute of Management Accountants entitled: Case Study: Measuring the ROI of Planning Software.

Rand Heer, Alight Planning CEO, comments on the webinar, We were pleased to have over 800 finance professionals attend the IMA webinar earlier this month. The SoftLayer success story is generating a lot of buzz in the industry and third-party analyst firms are expressing interest in developing an in-depth case study that would verify the ROI which is estimated at 50x.

SoftLayer is the global cloud infrastructure platform that operates 13 data centers in the US. Given the rapid growth in this sector, the annual budgeting process was insufficient; SoftLayer took a dynamic, continuous approach to planning throughout the year. SoftLayer first replaced spreadsheets with Centages Budget Maestro software package. In 2009, the finance team began a search to replace Centage with a solution that would enable a more intuitive and integrated driver-based planning model and rapid scenario analysis in order to support the rapid growth.

While Centage was a step up compared to planning in spreadsheets, we could not create an integrated driver-based model, said Gary Kinman, Vice President of Finance and Analytics at SoftLayer, Since sales units were stored in an isolated module, sales units could not be used to drive capital expenses or operations headcount. Of course, we could drive revenue in Centage with sales units, but with Alight Planning, our driver-based model is now fully integrated. Analysis to adjust volume or pricing of a certain product that required 30 minutes in Centage was taking 3 minutes in Alight Planning. Our ability to quickly perform analysis on-the-fly with Alight Planning is leading to better decisions. We now have a better feel for the direction to take as a company.

The ROI Calculator developed earlier this year is generating some interesting conclusions about the state of budgeting and planning software, said Ben Lamorte of Alight Planning. Gary and I reflected on life before and after Alight Planning leading to a documented efficiency savings of about $ 100,000 over the last three years associated with moving to Alight Planning. The $ 100,000 is a result of doing the same things SoftLayer did with Centage, but doing them faster with integrated driver-based panning we call these type 1 benefits. Benefits of over $ 3M were associated with introducing new planning processes that were not even attempted prior to Alight Planning. These type 2 benefits included optimizing cash management and analyzing profitability by location. To our knowledge, SoftLayers implementation of Alight Planning represents the largest ROI documented in the history of mid-market planning software.

About SoftLayer Technologies

SoftLayer is the global cloud infrastructure platform provider built for Internet scale. Headquartered in Dallas, the company operates 13 data centers in the US, Asia and Europe; worldwide network points of presence; and a high-speed global network for secure, low-latency communications. SoftLayers modular architecture, full-featured API and sophisticated automation create a flexible platform that seamlessly integrates physical and virtual systems. With 100,000 servers under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world, with a portfolio of 25,000 leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, please visit softlayer.com or call 1.866.398.7638.

About Alight Planning

Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and intuitive interfaces provide enable finance teams to rapidly build any driver-based planning model, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Rapidly deployed and IT-independent, Alight Planning has been embraced by organizations of all sizes. Alight has over 300 customers including Kaiser Permanente, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.







Nexus Achieves Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization from Cisco in USA

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Valencia, Calif. (PRWEB) July 13, 2012

Nexus IS, Inc. (Nexus) announced today that it has achieved the Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization from Cisco. This specialization recognizes Nexus as having fulfilled the training requirements and program prerequisites to sell, design and deploy comprehensive Cisco

Corus360 Achieves Premier Certification from Cisco

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Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) July 11, 2012

Corus360, a technology consulting and solutions firm in Norcross, GA, announced it has achieved Premier Certification from Cisco. To earn Premier Certification, Corus360 had to meet standards for networking competency, service, support and customer satisfactions set forth by Cisco.

This is a great accomplishment for us as we continue to build a solid Networking Practice. This will allow Corus360 to assist clients with an array of offerings in and outside of the Data Center, said Jay Moore, Director of Sales Operations at Corus360.

We are excited and pleased to have achieved Cisco Premier status. We look forward to partnering with Cisco and our customers to offer a wide array of products and services. Corus360 has assembled an outstanding team of Cisco Certified engineers to design and deliver solutions. We plan to add Cisco Specialty certifications around Data Center Architecture, Security and Express UC, as well as integrate Cisco’s Cloud solution into Corus360′s Cloud offerings, said Scott Rowe, Vice President of Professional Services.

Cisco is committed to providing tools, training and programs to help drive partner growth, differentiation and profitability, said Surinder Brar, Senior Director of Worldwide Channels at Cisco. With specializations in CCDA, CCNA, CXFA, CXFF, CXFS, and CSE, Corus360 has made an investment in delivering the integrated and customized technology solutions todays customers demand.