Despite the hiring freeze, Life Time IT has a full project list that keeps growing to keep pace with the expansion of the company. One concern: The selection of a Siebel CRM system will strain the current infrastructure and raise MMS integration issues. Installing the CRM application outside the corporate offices will require a complete assessment of the club server and network infrastructure.
To help future application rollouts to the clubs, Life Time is rebuilding its WAN topology, looking to do frame-link consolidation at strategic geographic termination points, thus pulling them back to corporate via larger bandwidth links. Life Time says this change should cut costs and allow for easier provisioning of new club WAN services. That's critical because the company plans to add six clubs per year.
McKee is evaluating QoS software to help prioritize critical business traffic coming from the club facilities. The products he is considering are software-based and would operate in conjunction with the Squid proxies at each club. The QoS and Siebel CRM projects represent the bulk of funded initiatives for the network operations group. But as is often the case, projects lacking formal funding are just as critical to the success of the IT organization and company as a whole. Strategic initiatives, such as antivirus software to the desktop, evaluation of dDOS (distributed denial of service) prevention technology, and creation of custom applications for the accounting and payroll departments, are creating serious challenges for an organization with a hiring freeze and fixed budget. Stay tuned for updates on how Life Time IT is keeping its infrastructure in top shape.
James Hutchinson is Network Computing's director of editorial content. Send your comments on this article to him at [email protected].
Extensible Markup Language (XML): Similar to HTML, XML is a text-format language that is the basis for structured documents on the Web. See www.w3.org/XML/1999/XML-in-10-points.
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