In March 2007, Toronto-based condominium developer Tridel Corporation was in the midst of a phase-by-phase network infrastructure upgrade when its single core switch failed. The result was a day-long, organization-wide outage for which Tridel CIO Ted Maulucci estimates losses in the order of $20,000 per hour due to the total loss of productivity. “People ended up going home,” Ted says, “because there was a very limited amount of work that they could accomplish without connectivity.”
Tridel immediately began to plan for a longer term solution, and by that fall had essentially decided to stay with the incumbent technology system. But Metafore was convinced that there was a better way to go and urged Ted Maulucci to reconsider. Ted was reluctant to change course, but as a long-time client he was willing to listen to Metafore’s recommendations. “Metafore,” he explains, “was able to say, ‘You haven’t looked at this solution, and you should look at it. It’s going to fit what you need.’ Understanding how we were structured and how we operate, they were able to bring us something that saved us a lot of money.”
Metafore demonstrated that a competitor’s solution (in this instance, HP ProCurve) would meet or exceed all of Tridel’s technical requirements, not only at a lower capital cost but also with much lower operating costs – to the extent that total cost of ownership (TCO) would be as much as 50% lower. As a result of the dramatic cost-savings, Tridel was able to replace much more than its core switch. “I ended up upgrading the entire network,” says Ted Maulucci, “bringing the whole company to a different level.”
