Case Study

Genisys Group

The Genisys Group of companies, founded by Ashok J Rabheru in 1985, with headquarters in the UK and offices in the USA and India has annual revenues in excess of $60M. The individual skills of each of the specialist companies combine to provide all customers of the Genisys Group with high value cost effective services and solutions.

Genisys Enterprise is a major supplier of creative IT solutions and services to the corporate market place. Made up of Genisys, eGenisys, Genisys Software, Talent Village, Genisys Enterprise, SD Genisys and the USbased Genisys Software Inc. It has offices in Basingstoke, London, Bangalore and New York and has approximately six hundred employees across the four offices.

Genisys Enterprise has established alliances with industry leaders like IBM, HP, Cisco, Toshiba, Novell, Sun and Citrix that allow them to rapidly create and deploy solutions that integrate seamlessly with their customers’ existing computing environments. The Challenge Genisys enjoys an annual growth rate of around 30% and consequently its IT infrastructure needs are constantly developing. Although Genisys had never had any reliability related problems with its previous service, the limited bandwidth was restricting business growth as it could not provide sufficient performance to support the growing number of Citrix users on the network. Up until January 2005, it had been using a 2Mbps leased line to handle its WAN requirements, when a business technology review recommended that it needed at least 5Mbps to handle its requirements efficiently. There was also a view that the contract for a 2Mbps leased line between the London and Basingstoke offices and a 768kbps internet connection had become uncompetitive when benchmarked against new service offerings. “We were starting to see productivity and business efficiency reaching a bottleneck because of our network limitations,” said Paul Stone, Group IT Director, Genisys. “There were things that we wanted to do that we just couldn’t manage with our current arrangements. The bandwidth was the main issue, but we were also using a tape library as our primary method of storage when we wanted to be able to back-up our business critical data from the Basingstoke headquarters using real-time replication at the London office. Unfortunately, given our current arrangements, this was out of the question.” It was also imperative that the new network was reliable. eGenisys hosts a number of customer websites so it is critical that service providers offer minimal downtime. 

At A Glance:

Company • Genisys Group

Industry • IT Services

MDNX Solution • Ethernet point-to-point, 2Mbps DSL internet connection, 2Mbps Leased Line internet connection

Key Benefits • 7 x the bandwidth for less money  • Elimination of bandwidth bottleneck enabled the business to grow as users could be added • Real-time data replication with tape back-up between sites ensures business continuity

“It makes good business sense to have all of our network and access packages supplied by a single provider, especially one as responsive and consistent as MDNX” Paul Stone, Group IT Director

The Solution

 Genisys looked at four different providers for its new network and eventually decided on MDNX’s point-to-point Ethernet service. Genisys had been using a 768kbps internet connection and 2Mbps between the London and Basingstoke offices. MDNX provided a 10Mbps Ethernet connection between the offices, a 2Mbps DSL internet connection for the London office and a 2Mbps Leased Line internet connection for the Basingstoke office.  “MDNX offered precise customisation of the service we chose – no other provider we looked at would have allowed us to manage and stay in control of our own network, whereas MDNX were happy to supply the solution ‘wires only’ and let us handle the rest,” Stone continued. “They’ve also saved us a substantial amount of money – we’ve implemented the new solution for just under the amount that we were paying for our previous network.” 

The Results

The business now runs more smoothly with the London office, primarily made up of Citrix users, able to overcome restrictive bandwidth limitations, support more clients and run demanding applications such as Shockwave. General business productivity and efficiency has increased, and Genisys continue to enjoy reliably robust uptime. Genisys also uses Microsoft Sharepoint to collaborate on and track projects between the two UK offices, and the MDNX Ethernet solution has improved both the reliability and responsiveness of the application.

The legacy network cost around £40,000 – MDNX’s solution provided considerably more bandwidth than that for less money. The cost saving will be spent on advancing and improving IT infrastructure, rather than on outof-date technology.  

“The benefits of gaining a connection between the offices with seven times the bandwidth of the original, for a little under the price of the original, speak for themselves,” commented Stone.  They have also been able to achieve real-time data replication between the Basingstoke headquarters and the London office, as well as using tapes as an extra layer of storage security, ensuring business continuity.  “It makes good business sense to have all of our network and access packages supplied by a single provider, especially one as responsive and consistent as MDNX,” continued Stone. “We have every confidence in them and look forward to working with them in the future.”

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