Customer:	Channel Advantage
	Solution:	Dedicated Lotus Domino Hosting
	Benefits:	High availability, total reliability

"From the beginning, Blue Sky has provided us with a highly cost-effective solution – and as we’ve grown, the team has been able to provide us with the solutions to move forward. Also, their help with moving our infrastructure to Microsoft Exchange has been fantastic."

Situation

Channel Advantage is an IT field marketing company, handling everything from marketing campaign implementation, shelf replenishment and display merchandising to product sales and demonstrations for a large base of national and international clients within the IT sector.

Field marketing is a fast-moving industry that requires quick turnaround and up-to-the-minute feedback. As a result, all Channel Advantage field personnel are web enabled and carry digital cameras, to ensure optimum delivery of data from the field to the client.

This online reporting system enables the essential delivery of field results and photographs on a daily basis to clients, including over weekends. But of course this requires rock-solid hosting with 24/7/365 reliability.

Solution

Blue Sky Hosting custom-designed a dedicated Lotus Domino hosting solution for Channel Advantage. This fully supported infrastructure is run out of Blue Sky’s data centres and offers high availability, with round-the-clock monitoring and support so that in the unlikely event of a system failure, repair and restoration is immediate – even over weekends.

The bespoke Lotus Domino solution also offers:

• Constant back-ups, so that no information is lost
• Powerful Lotus Domino servers that keep field staff connected at all times, wherever they are
• The ability to handle a great number of people inputting data from various locations at any one time
• Complete security, so that sensitive market-based information is 100% confidential

Results

From implementation in 2004 to early 2008, this solution proved highly reliable and efficient, enabling Channel Advantage to deliver industry-leading field marketing to their clients consistently and reliably.

Following their future-proof approach to all hosting solutions, early in 2008 Blue Sky migrated Channel Advantage to an even more robust Lotus Domino platform. Apart from keeping abreast of recent technological advances, this new platform allows field staff to run even more services on Windows mobile devices.

As a result of the success of this project, Blue Sky Hosting is currently designing an additional system for Channel Advantage, hosted on Microsoft Exchange.