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Kodak selects a&o for EMEA support contract

Single maintenance contract across 14 countries in EMEA enables improved visibility and control.

23rd October 2007 Kodak, the leading provider of products and services to the photographic market, has chosen a&o to provide managed server support across 14 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

a&o will provide support for Microsoft Windows and Unix servers running critical back-office applications, including certain manufacturing processes of photographic equipment. This model supports an organisational restructure to streamline operations and reduce the number of suppliers in use, therefore gaining better visibility and control.

Robert Spencer at Kodak states: “Previously each country had an individual maintenance contract for server support, which was managed by a centralised team in the UK. It was incredibly difficult to initiate hardware maintenance as there was a lack of alignment across the different countries, and in addition there was a variation in overheads.”

He continues; “By consolidating to a single supplier, we achieved many benefits including leveraging better contracts, gaining control of operational costs, and having the transparency to enable us to manage maintenance more effectively. We have achieved everything we aimed to when setting out on the restructure programme.”

In line with the organisational restructure, Kodak reviewed its server support contracts and decided to outsource the process to a single supplier, a&o. With a support network of 4,000 IT professionals across Europe, a&o is perfectly placed to deliver an efficient and consistent service.

The maintenance process is now more efficient. The central management team in the UK make one telephone call to an a&o call centre, and a local a&o engineer is dispatched to carry out the maintenance. Kodak has strict SLAs in place, agreed on a per-country and per-server basis, which can be changed in line with business needs, meaning it has the appropriate level of support.

Steve Ball, Managing Director at a&o, states: “Working with a&o has allowed Kodak to operate a centralised support model to gain more control of its server infrastructure across Europe. Our extensive support network across Europe means we can meet the strict SLAs put in place, guaranteeing Kodak the maximum support to maintain its back-office applications.”

 

For more information, contact press@aogroup.co.uk