Customers

Iron Mountain

"With Data Federator, we're aiming to improve how we execute our business day-to-day and hour-to-hour, in a quest for high-quality service to our customer."

Dave Weldon
vice president of information technology
Iron Mountain

Challenge

Since 1951, Iron Mountain has helped clients store and protect important corporate information. This is a growing business - during the 10 years since its IPO, Iron Mountain has grown revenues 1,900% - from $104 million to $2.078 billion in 2005. Today, Iron Mountain is a $2.2 billion company that operates in 33 countries on five continents.

Of course, not all client needs are equal. Some companies ship away documents to be destroyed to prevent identity theft. Others store critical information offsite as a precaution in the event of a disaster. And still others need assistance managing records in a compliant manner, something that has become increasingly important since the advent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Nevertheless, all clients share a tendency to generate explosive amounts of data. This brings in good business for Iron Mountain. But it also creates a big strain on the firm's client-server infrastructure. According to Dave Weldon, vice president of information technology for Iron Mountain, "Our systems store over 55 columns of information describing each customer box or file in our Record Centers. With more than 800 Record Centers in the United States alone, that's a lot of data."

As of just a few months ago, tracking all that information was the job of an internally developed system that had access to 180 databases. "We needed a way to dynamically connect and disconnect to various database," says Weldon, "depending on which customer's information we were retrieving. In our world, the system had to get the customer identification number from one database and then connect to various other databases to all the other information about the customer. Our reporting was very batch-oriented. The most current data you could get was at least 12 minutes old." In the case of employees, the wait for report output could be as much as 30 days.

Weldon's team decided they had to improve customer service and response time, but they knew the task would be daunting. "It's almost impossible to do without sophisticated coding, and you can't just write the program once and forget it. You've got to constantly be in there adjusting it every few months as the application grows across more databases," says Weldon.

Free Nucleus Research ROI Case Study
Learn how Iron Mountain increased ROI by 119% in ten months, and how your company can do the same.
Read more - PDF 157KB

Approach

Hand coding was ultimately ruled out. Instead, Weldon and his team evaluated the enterprise information management (EIM) products and services from Business Objects. EIM is a combination of strategy, practices, and open technologies for delivering trusted, integrated, and timely information. For Iron Mountain, several EIM products were put in place, including BusinessObjects™ Data Federator XI and BusinessObjects Crystal Reports® XI.

Data Federator's data virtualization capabilities proved to be especially fruitful. According to Weldon, "It acts as a semantic layer that provides one big view of all of our databases. So, instead of 160 different databases, Crystal sees one."

This dramatically enhanced the reporting experience. But not even Weldon could have guessed that real-time reporting would be possible. "We thought we were going to have to pull all the data out and put it into a reporting database we'd refresh once a day. Now, with Data Federator, we're aiming to improve how we execute our business day-to-day and hour-to-hour, in the quest for high-quality service to our customers."

Over time, says Weldon, the expected performance boost should allow Iron Mountain to directly expose some of its system data to as many as 200,000 clients via a self-service portal. This would be a huge win for those who frequently need obscure data on short notice, such as when a lawsuit is filed.

Results

So what are the benefits of all this automation? "Cash in the bank," says Weldon. "We conservatively estimate that Data Federator, BusinessObjects XI, and Crystal XI will save us roughly one million dollars annually." He attributes most of this to labor costs and the cost of printing reams of reports that, before BusinessObjects XI, didn't provide a clear enough picture of company performance.

Most important, though, are the vast improvements in customer service. Gone are the days when employees requested reports from the IT department, followed by agonizing days of waiting. "Thanks to EIM tools from Business Objects, we can now drastically improve customer service by making information much friendlier and more accessible for our employees. Eventually, we'll extend the same courtesy to our customers, and we'll be helping them save a ton of money and time in the process."

Smaller textLarger textPrint this page, properly formatted for paper

Related Info
Quick Facts