EarthLink, Inc. has teamed with Broadleaf Services to deliver Samsonite LLC a managed colocation solution and professional services to transform the company’s IT infrastructure. As part of the solution, Samsonite has migrated all of its North American IT operations to an EarthLink’s SSAE 16 SOC 2 compliant data center.

EarthLink worked with Channel Partner Broadleaf Services to thoroughly understand Samsonite’s business needs. Samsonite was looking for a national provider that offered fully-managed colocation services and could help their company migrate to the cloud and an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution. EarthLink customized a solution which included professional services to execute the migration of Samsonite’s physical IT assets to the EarthLink data center. EarthLink will also provide Samsonite with ongoing consulting on capacity planning as well as server and storage utilization to ensure Samsonite’s IT environment is properly sized and operating at peak efficiency.

According to Samsonite, EarthLink’s Managed Services have significantly reduced the time and personnel resources that Samsonite’s IT staff needs to deploy to manage its IT infrastructure.

“We sought a solid relationship with a service provider willing to help us fulfill our long term objective of building an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment and move to the cloud in the future,” said Bill Morrison, director of IT Americas for Samsonite LLC. “When Broadleaf recommended EarthLink, we were very impressed with their data center in Marlborough, MA, which is located near our U.S. headquarters. EarthLink and Broadleaf’s professional services and engineering expertise made the migration to the data center incredibly smooth. With server and data center management off our plate, I can now assign my IT team to more strategic projects that will help our company innovate and grow.”  

Ted Lambert, vice president of sales, Broadleaf, explains that EarthLink was the clear choice. “Samsonite was looking to build a true partnership with a managed service provider. They wanted a provider that has the ability to deliver the level of service they need for the long term and will communicate effectively with the Samsonite IT team. As Samsonite grows, they want the partnership to flourish and for EarthLink to provide additional services when needed. EarthLink understood Samsonite’s vision, developed the long and short term solutions and executed a near seamless data center migration,” he said. “EarthLink also provided a business continuity solution to protect the IT environment during the migration phase.”

“One of EarthLink’s great strengths is how well we collaborate with partners like Broadleaf to create customized solutions for customers,” said Michael. D. Toplisek, executive vice president of sales and marketing, EarthLink. “Enabling Samsonite to hand off time-consuming server maintenance and consolidate their global data center operations with us frees their IT team to focus more on their core business.”