Pivoting to remote work to meet the challenges of
COVID-19
How Konecta Peru seamlessly transitioned to remote work rapidly and without any upfront capital investment with Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services, powered by Intel® Xeon® Platinum processors.
Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions
for The Data-Centered
Pivoting to remote work to meet the challenges of
COVID-19
How Konecta Peru seamlessly transitioned to remote work rapidly and without any upfront capital investment with Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services, powered by Intel® Xeon® Platinum processors.
Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions
for The Data-Centered
Background
Konecta Peru is one of the largest full-service Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and contact center service providers in Peru, with 23.4% market share and 14,000 employees. Its service offerings include providing telephone communication, email management, FAQ websites, social media, live web chats, mobile applications, surveys, and data management for its clients.
Its parent company Konecta Group operates 90 contact centers in nine countries, serves over 300 clients, and employs 70,000 people worldwide.
Challenge
Since 2011, Peru has become one of Konecta’s top markets, and the company provides services for a significant number of clients across the region. Konecta’s recent acquisition of the Rockethall group of companies will further expand Konecta Peru’s client base and workforce, and increase the need for flexible IT solutions.
Carlos Rafael Alayo Velasquez, Information Technology (IT) Director at Konecta Peru, begins: “We aim to expand our market share to 25% and to continue strengthening our position as Peru’s leading BPO service provider. In spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have achieved significant business growth in the last year, taking on 9,000 new employees.”
To serve an ever-growing client base, Konecta Peru must be able to allocate both human and IT resources dynamically—particularly during COVID times.
When the government declared a health emergency, an emergency lockdown measure was imposed and citizens were ordered to stay at home. To fulfill service commitments, we had to give thousands of employees secure access to client systems from their homes, so that they could work remotely with all the right tools and comply with the same data security standards as in the office. To do this, we decided to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI] solution for secure remote access and rapid rollout to agents.
Rapid installation, faster time to value.
Konecta Peru worked closely with a team from Lenovo Professional Services to design a platform for its new VDI environment based on the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution.
Next, the Lenovo team implemented eight Lenovo ThinkAgile VX7520 appliances at Konecta Peru’s data center in Lima. Lenovo owns the deployment and installation of the hardware, and Konecta Peru pays only for the server utilization. The infrastructure is monitored and managed remotely by Lenovo Managed Services, ensuring maximum uptime.
Why Lenovo? All-in-one, as-a-Service solution.
To support the new VDI solution, Konecta Peru looked for a flexible, easily scalable, low-maintenance infrastructure platform.
Carlos Alayo comments: “Because of the complex connectivity requirements and security concerns, the public cloud was not an option. However, the cloud model did appeal to us, especially since we wanted a platform that could scale dynamically without all the hassle of procuring, installing, and maintaining physical infrastructure ourselves.”
After a thorough evaluation, Konecta Peru determined that Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services, powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, was the ideal choice for their company. This is a deal based on a subscription that gives companies the option to use and pay for data center hardware and services—on premises or at another preferred location—without having to purchase the equipment.
“We considered several Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, including HPE GreenLake Cloud Services,” recalls Carlos Alayo. “Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services came highly recommended by our partner Blue Ocean Technologies, who we have worked with for many years and have trust in. We were very impressed by the flexibility, transparency, agility, and reduced financial risk that Lenovo TruScale offered, and how quickly the Lenovo team sprang into action.”
With Lenovo TruScale, out of band monitoring and metering via Lenovo XClarity Controller embedded in every server on a separate microprocessor means that data center infrastructure can be monitored without putting any load on the infrastructure. The resource usage model is based on the CPU utilization per node, meaning that Lenovo TruScale customers are charged based on the workloads they are processing.
The collaboration between our internal IT team, Blue Ocean Technologies, and Lenovo was fantastic. Everyone pulled together to get the infrastructure installed, and the new VDI environment was up and running in just 30 days.
Results
Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services meets Konecta Peru’s requirements for availability, scalability, and security, while also keeping operational costs transparent and minimizing risk.
“With Lenovo TruScale, we can ramp up resources one week and dial them down the next, only ever paying for what we actually use,” says Carlos Alayo. “This enables us to respond rapidly to changing business requirements as we continue to grow. Crucially, we run the workloads in our own data center, so we can ensure compliance with security and data protection standards.”
Today, the eight-node Lenovo ThinkAgile VX cluster supports more than 1,500 VDI users. This has helped Konecta Peru to lessen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on operations, minimizing disruption for clients. The company is already planning to expand its Lenovo TruScale implementation with nine additional Lenovo ThinkAgile VX 7000 Series appliances to meet increased demand.
Remote work has also improved employee satisfaction, as Carlos Alayo explains: “Many employees, particularly those who live far from our contact centers, now have a better work-life balance, are happier, and more productive. COVID-19 has been a catalyst for change, and we expect to take a hybrid approach to work in the future.”
99.95% availability
Rapid time to value
OPEX, pay-for-what-you-use consumption model
Elastic scalability
24/7 remote monitoring and data center management services
Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure Services gives us all the key advantages of the public cloud without any of the drawbacks and with the best experience. With Lenovo TruScale, we can respond to business needs quickly, easily, and without worrying about infrastructure. It certainly lives up to our expectations.
Accelerate your business with an as-a-Service strategy
With Lenovo’s TruScale, pay-as-you-go solution, you don’t just get technology that’s open, proven, and ready to deploy. You get a partner dedicated to helping you every step of the way — from securely and rapidly migrating your data, to managing it all, and helping it grow with you.
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