Headquartered in Edmonton, the Running Room, Canada's largest specialty running retailer, operates 102 corporately owned stores across Canada and the U.S. catering exclusively to runners. In addition to shoes, apparel and other athletic equipment, the Running Room provides in-store and on-line running clinics that encourage a healthier lifestyle. The tremendous success of these clinics is evident from the more than 600,000 clinic graduates to date. The company also helps to organize, promote and support more than 600 walks and runs that raise millions of dollars for charities and non-profit organizations annually.
The Running Room decided to outsource its critical IT infrastructure after experiencing repeated disruptions due to server downtime and coming to the realization that a small room in a warehouse was not a proper environment for the computer systems of a rapidly growing company.
After conducting an RFP with the help of a management consulting firm, the Running Room chose Q9 Networks as its data centre partner, and an Infrastructure Services solution was implemented at Q9's state-of-the-art Calgary data centre consisting of dedicated servers, centralized tape backup, 100 per cent available Internet connection and a highly secure, dedicated firewall - all fully monitored and managed by Q9 on a 24x7 basis. At the time, administrative and non-critical, backend applications were kept at the Running Room and managed by in-house IT staff.
"Outsourcing gave us access to technology, expertise and services on a scale we couldn't provide ourselves," explains Ryan White, Director of IT at the Running Room. "Q9's world-class data centre has been delivering the highest levels of performance, reliability and security for our key business processes ever since."
Since the initial contract with Q9, the Running Room has grown considerably, adding more than 30 new stores to its roster. What hasn't changed much, however, is that communications, namely e-mail, is the number one priority process within the company. With so many staff constantly out on the road using mobile devices to connect with stores, customers, head office and each other, reliable, 24x7 communications is simply a 'must have' for the Running Room, especially when dealing with suppliers scattered all over the world.
"If our e-mail communications went down for even an hour it would be huge problem for us," says White. "With e-mail on a Q9-managed server connected to the Internet via Q9's faulttolerant connectivity service, our executives, area managers and staff enjoy 100 per cent communications uptime."
Other critical aspects of Running Room operations, including an accounting system and a system for inventory, sales tracking and point-of-sale, all run on Q9 servers.
"The benefits of having Q9 manage all this infrastructure are tremendous," says White. "I can't even fathom having to look after the servers and other equipment ourselves. If we did, the cost in hours for monitoring and maintenance would be huge and I would have to carry spare parts for everything, which would mean significant logistics and costs."
The Running Room recently expanded its relationship with Q9 to include co-location services. Less-critical applications and supporting hardware previously located internally were moved to the Q9 data centre to further leverage the benefits of outsourcing.
In this arrangement, Q9 provides the environment (e.g. space, power, cooling, security and monitoring), while the Running Room owns the equipment and is responsible for ongoing maintenance and support. The Running Room often addresses maintenance requirements by requesting 'hands & eyes' support from Q9 technicians, who help analyze and resolve problems on the Running Room's behalf.
White and his IT team are particularly impressed by the fact that every aspect of the Q9 environment is very controlled and redundancy is designed into everything, including the power system, which not only consists of generator back-up to utility power, but which also provides each server cabinet with dual power distribution systems.
"We rarely have to deal with Q9, and when we do, it's usually them alerting us to a potential problem," says White. "They are always there to help us isolate the problem; and if a piece of hardware in our environment requires service, even if it's just to replace a failed disk in a redundant storage array, for example, they still inform us of what's going on just to be sure we aren't doing something at the same time that might conflict with what they need to do. It's just good communications."
The Running Room's IT team is now delivering a stable, reliable and secure infrastructure at a fraction of the cost and effort of doing it internally; and it appears that problems are few and far between.
"Our interaction with Q9 is almost invisible to us and we rarely have to speak to them unless we want to make changes to our infrastructure," states White.
And instead of resulting in lost jobs, a common outsourcing concern of IT managers and staff, the Q9 solution actually contributes to enhancing the roles of Running Room's existing IT professionals and allows them to focus on core tasks that generate greater business value for the company.
