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CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
Lawson and Acxiom:
A Partnership Built on Trust
Challenge
• Lawson’s business relied on various internally developed applications that required
continuous support. • While the primary applications were hosted on a mainframe, there were a number of
components that ran on a variety of platforms and were getting increasingly difficult to monitor. “Acxiom’s team of experts
have provided exemplary
services for the systems
they manage and have
stood shoulder to shoulder
with us when we needed
technical support for
systems outside their
area of responsibility. The
Acxiom team has been a
partner in the truest sense.”
—Kevin Hoople
Vice President, IT
Lawson
About Lawson:
• Industrial distributor of
maintenance and repair
supplies
• Company revenue of $270 million in 2013
• Sells more than 300,000
different products to
customers in all 50 states,
Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico
and the Caribbean
• Acxiom partner since 2009
• The cost of maintaining data center space for the mainframe was escalating, and disaster
recovery/business continuity services were becoming increasingly expensive. • The company wanted a more flexible, integrated infrastructure that would allow it to
provide the agility and responsiveness its customers desired.
Solution
• Lawson’s mainframe and open systems environments were migrated into an Acxiom data
center, and day-to-day operations were transitioned to Acxiom. • Advanced tools and processes were implemented to enable 24/7 monitoring of the
application suite.
• Acxiom provided consultative direction on Lawson’s underlying infrastructure during the
ERP selection process; after SAP was chosen, Acxiom undertook an extremely aggressive
migration off the mainframe and onto the new SAP environment. • Fully managed utility server services were extended to the new environment, allowing
flexible volumes on servers, SAN, network, backups and monitoring.
• Disaster recovery was implemented for the new environment using both SAN replication and tape recovery; a failover test proved that the RPO and RTO requirements could be
easily achieved.
Benefits
• Lawson experienced improved performance and reliability of its mainframe and open
systems environments, thereby enabling it to focus on the SAP implementation.
• By quickly stabilizing the mainframe platform, Lawson was able to transition to the SAP
environment faster than originally expected. Because of the strength of the relationship,
early termination of the original mainframe agreement was able to be negotiated and an
extension for the new environment put in place.
• By leveraging Acxiom’s utility model, Lawson gained scalability and flexibility in deploying
services, improved responsiveness to the business and gained greater cost predictability. • Disaster recovery capabilities helped minimize risk to the business and delivered peace of mind.
Learn how Acxiom is
helping clients solve
challenges by calling
• Acxiom’s technical expertise, combined with improved monitoring services, enabled
Lawson to make better and faster decisions about its business.
• A partnership with Acxiom built on trust has helped position Lawson for growth.
844.2ACXIOM
or visit
www.AcxiomIT.com.
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