When a company needs advanced thermal technology, chances are they will consider Chromalox. The Pittsburgh-based manufacturer ranks among the few companies in its field that can provide a total solution for any industrial heating challenge in any environment. Simply consider: It retains more than a million configured parts.
In addition, the private company, founded in 1917, has a veteran team of engineers and designers, many of whom have been with Chromalox for over 30 years. Industrial customers seek out Chromalox drawn by its reputation for product and engineering quality and experience.
All customer order transactions are completed via the internet, so both the Chromalox intranet and the public-facing websites need to be available 24/7 to support internal sales staff, external sales representatives, and e-commerce customers worldwide. To ensure orders are not disrupted, Chromalox has relied on Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS) and its disaster recovery and backup IT services for nearly 10 years. Based on this trusted relationship, Chromalox tapped Sungard AS to provide enterprise cloud services to host its web and e-commerce business services.
Collaborating for Business Solutions
Chromalox previously used a smaller provider to host its website. But when Dan Boehm, director of IT for Chromalox, began to consider migration to a cloud environment, the company’s former host provider didn’t think it had the resources to sustain.
Chromalox needed a flexible, more scalable environment. Based on Boehm’s relationship with Sungard AS for disaster-recovery IT services, he inquired about cloud services and was presented with an enterprise cloud migration project plan that fully met the company’s needs.
“We had a really tight deadline and the migration had to be completed within a short timeframe — several months,” explains Boehm. “It’s an integral part of our sales operations, and Sungard AS really stepped up.”
The cloud migration process — including project plan, system design, and supplier environment set up — can be a long process. “Sungard AS took ownership of the project, having the expertise to formalize the plan and effectively set up supplier environments, and that made a real difference,” he says.
Chromalox constantly monitors performance on the site and, Boehm notes, with the new Sungard AS cloud environment there has been a “huge spike in the quality of service. All in all, the move was a huge win for Chromalox. We’re not paying any more money than before and we’re getting 25% faster response times,” he added.
Results
Boehm and his team have experienced significant application performance increases by leveraging Sungard AS Enterprise Cloud Services. As technologies continue to advance, Boehm believes Sungard AS will have the partnerships and portfolio to support the company’s expansion.
Overall, partnering with Sungard AS frees Boehm and his small staff to handle more value-added and customer-centric opportunities. “We are in the industrial manufacturing business, not the IT business, so we rely on Sungard AS to keep our technology up and running and safe so we can focus on growing the business,” Boehm said.
