Critigen

Sector: Water

AWWA

BACKGROUND
American Water Works Association (AWWA) is an international, nonprofit, scientific and educational society dedicated to the improvement of water quality and supply. Founded in 1881, AWWA is the largest organization of water supply professionals in the world. Its nearly 60,000 members represent the full spectrum of the water community: treatment plant operators and managers, scientists, environmentalists, manufacturers, consultants, academicians, regulators, and others who hold genuine interest in water supply and public health. Membership includes more than 4,700 utilities that supply water to roughly 180 million people in North America. Further information about AWWA can be found at www.awwa.org.

CHALLENGE

With recent changes to AWWA’s applications portfolio, including the extensive promotion of a more robust ecommerce presence, AWWA needed a strong provider to ensure the availability and ongoing support of a 24x7 operation. 

SOLUTION

The new hosted IT solution improves operational efficiencies; as well as addresses network optimization, business continuity and remote infrastructure management. In its new IT model, AWWA is receiving extensive monitoring and management, creating a more efficient infrastructure while maintaining current cost levels within the organization. Over time, improvements to the IT environment are expected to reduce the total spend on operations management while maintaining a vastly improved production operations environment. In addition, Critigen’s management of the operations environment for AWWA enables internal staff members to direct their efforts to other critical initiatives.

“Organizations such as AWWA, and many of their constituents in the water market, find themselves faced with the challenge of reducing capital expenditures and eliminating costs,” said Kevin Mungle, Critigen senior vice president. “The migration to an infrastructure-as-a-service model is just one of the many ways Critigen can help water market leaders activate new levels of operational efficiency.”

RESULT

To date, AWWA has transitioned nearly 100-percent of their mission-critical infrastructure over to Critigen, including accounting, association management systems, multiple websites, e-mail and other key line-of-business applications. Critigen is actively managing and monitoring these systems. During the move, AWWA migrated production servers from three locations to Critigen, resulting in a greatly simplified environment.

In future phases, as servers and other hardware come out of warranty, Critigen will further reduce AWWA’s capital addition, Critigen is planning activities to support network optimization, business continuity and disaster recovery assessments and a comprehensive review of remote infrastructure management of any AWWA assets that remain on-site, such as file and print servers.

The movement toward an infrastructure-as-a-service model benefits AWWA in a number of ways including:

• Cost: Utilizing managed services, AWWA will eliminate the need for capital expenditures. Critigen will provide all hardware and software in a monthly service fee. Hardware expenditures are transferred from capital expense to operational budgets.
• Resources: Critigen maintains a highly trained and experienced 24x7 staff to monitor and manage all the technology provided.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA): Critigen SLA provides 24x7 management of customer critical systems while guaranteeing response times and availability, including network uptime of 99 percent and server uptime of 98 percent.
• Management: Critigen is fully responsible for the ongoing maintenance, support, hardware, and security for the platform environment.

Critigen came to the table with very strong credentials, including extensive expertise managing hosted IT solutions in mission-critical environments on a global scale. According to Kevin Mungle, Critigen senior vice president, “We were exceptionally pleased that another very complex migration was executed extremely well with no unplanned outages.”