Business Situation
Senior executives at the FCC made a decision to migrate their existing Netware NDS, GroupWise, ZenWorks, file, and print infrastructure to an all Microsoft infrastructure (AD, Exchange, SMS). Their goal was to enhance functionality, availability, reliability, supportability, manageability and to reduce risk and lower TCO.
The had determined early in the process their staff lacked the skills to implement the new infrastructure alone and issued an RFP to find a supplier capable of designing, developing and deploying the new enterprise infrastructure for the Commission’s three central offices, 24 field offices and 3000-plus end users.
The FCC also had an additional requirement to support full coexistence between 2 Windows 2000/Exchange 2000 environments to fulfil a regulatory requirement to maintain a separate infrastructure using the same namespace to support of their Auctions group. The Auctions group is responsible for auctioning the radio spectrum a group which is responsible for bringing considerable revenue to the United States government.
Solution
Originally included in the tender process to make up the numbers, Avanade won this business ahead of Compaq and Internosis in a competitive tender with a proposal and presentation emphasizing technical expertise.
Starting in March 2002, Avanade designed and implemented a new Microsoft directory, messaging, file, print, VPN, remote access, terminal services, management infrastructure. To satisfy the Commissions demand for remote services Avanade integrated SecurID with the following; Exchange Server 2000 with the Agencies fleet of Blackberry wireless devices; Microsoft’s VPN and Remote Access services.
The auctions group also got to keep the same namespace, courtesy of a dual forest coexistence implementation of Active Directory and Exchange Server. The project concluded in June 2003.
Results