Executive summary

Mondi Packaging – one of the world’s most successful paper and packaging companies – has seen substantial business expansion over the past ten years, achieved through a combination of acquisition and organic growth worldwide. However by late 2004 the company was being challenged by integration issues, caused by the prevalence of disparate, standalone email systems and domain addresses.

The company decided to standardise on a Microsoft Exchange platform and engaged directly with Microsoft to design the operating environment for its primary data centre in Vienna. To assure business continuity and provide geographic as well as functional resilience the company selected BT to host a secondary global email facility in the UK and also provide internet connectivity.

The BT solution is based on a hosted and fully managed Windows Server 2003 environment, delivered on a dedicated platform supporting Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Active Directory at BT’s St Albans Internet Data Centre (IDC). Legacy systems have been retired and projected annual cost saving of up to 60 per cent are forecast. The new approach has unified and simplified Mondi Packaging’s email communication, increased business resilience and security, and substantially enhanced business agility.

Marketplace

Mondi Packaging Group is one of the world’s most successful paper and packaging companies and is part of the Anglo American group. Headquartered in Vienna and employing over 15,000 people the company has a global sales and manufacturing presence with more than 140 plants and mills located across four continents in 40 countries. Mondi Packaging produces a vast array of products for a wide range of applications across multiple industry sectors.

Business opportunity

Mondi Packaging has seen substantial business growth over the past ten years, achieved through a combination of acquisition and aggressive expansion worldwide.
Mike Scammells, Enterprise Enabling Infrastructure Co-ordinator at Mondi Packaging, explains: “The company’s ambition is to unify and standardise operations, improve security and enable a single Mondi packaging dotcom domain and branding. But we had around 140 different email systems employing a variety of technologies including Lotus Notes and Sun iPlanet. We needed a cost effective rationalisation and support solution.”

The company decided to standardise on a Microsoft Exchange platform and engaged directly with Microsoft to design the operating environment for its primary data centre in Vienna. To assure business continuity the company chose to establish a secondary global email hosting facility in the UK. Mike Scammells continues: “BT already managed the mail system and provided internet connectivity for our UK business. We had been very pleased with the service and impressed with BT’s capability and so we invited them to submit a proposal against our new expanded requirements.”

Technology blueprint

The BT St Albans IDC is a Class-1 data centre environment. At the centre, two dedicated power distribution units feed Mondi Packaging server equipment, backed by standby generators and battery powered uninterruptible power supplies. The IDC is protected by a high quality aspirating fire detection system, with fixed-point sensors to provide early warning heat detection. Room temperature is maintained at 22°C within a tolerance of ±2°C. Humidity is maintained at 50 per cent ±10 per cent.

The heart of the BT monitoring system is Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, which provides comprehensive event and performance management, proactive monitoring, reporting and trend analysis. Ports are monitored every two minutes with any port not responding flagged to support staff by pager and email. HP Insight Manager monitors server hardware and disk space utilisation. Individual servers are configured to send a SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) trap to HP Insight Manager when any critical process stops.

For Mondi Packaging BT carries out tasks involved in the configuration and ongoing management of Microsoft servers to ensure the expected functions are performed in a secure and reliable manner. All servers are interconnected with management servers to enable the collection of statistics for reporting and management. A differentiating feature of the BT offer is that faults reported to BT’s control bridge single point of contact are managed to resolution in real time. The bridge also provides the co-ordination and control point for BT staff to ensure faults are corrected quickly and service availability is maintained.

BT solution

Mondi Packaging wanted to retain technical authority for the solution and required BT to deploy a Microsoft Exchange architecture (determined by Microsoft in Austria) as a satellite service to the main Vienna hub. This is a departure from the standard BT operating model in which it would normally design, deploy and monitor the solution against agreed levels of service.

Mike Scammells says: “BT was very flexible and showed a willingness to adapt normal procedures to tailor a solution to meet our specific needs, both operationally and commercially. Sometimes BT challenged our thinking and recommended alternative approaches, all of which served to increase confidence in the integrity of the solution deployed.”

The BT solution is based on a hosted and fully managed Windows Server 2003 environment, delivered on a dedicated platform and supporting Microsoft Exchange (mailbox, gateway and connector) and Microsoft Active Directory at BT’s St Albans Internet Data Centre (IDC). BT provides 24*7 monitoring and maintenance, backed by a second line helpdesk to accept and manage reported faults from email administrators around the globe. The BT service for Mondi Packaging has an availability guarantee. Faults are assigned one of four priority levels depending on the severity of the issue, with each having a service restoration target within a prescribed time. The BT service also provides for daily back ups.

The implementation was executed in two phases. The first phase extracted existing email addresses and mapped these against newly generated addresses on the Mondi packaging dotcom domain. This was achieved with the deployment of Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003. At this early stage BT provided hosting services and connectivity through the BTnet internet access service. Phase two extended the deployment to a total of five servers to enable the migration to a centralised global mail system.

The service includes the management and deployment of software patches, attendance at regular service review meetings and liaison with the Mondi Packaging Technical Design Authority to manage integration with and development of the wider email network. Mike Scammells observes: “The BT solution is very scalable and BT has been very accommodating to our requirements. The commercial model is also attractive to us, for example we pay by the Gigabyte for storage capacity, which provides us with enormous flexibility.”

Results

The new approach to email has delivered multiple business benefits, as Mike Scammells explains: “We now have one integrated email system for 7,000 employees across 140 sites. Security has been greatly enhanced as connectivity to the internet is now concentrated through Vienna or the UK. We have retired legacy systems and our messaging costs are projected to reduce by up to 60 per cent annually.”

Virus protection and anti-spam measures have been greatly enhanced. Feedback from Mondi Packaging staff on the new email service has been very positive with the vast majority enthusiastically embracing the integrated approach. The standard operating environment also enables the rapid and seamless integration of new business operations in the event of future acquisitions as the company continues to expand. In future, this will happen within a period of just five days rather than the two months it took previously.

Mike Scammells concludes: “The project has been a great success. BT service has been very good and our experience over the first half-year of full operation has demonstrated availability of 99.9 per cent, which is in excess of the contracted target.”

Why BT?

• Tailored hosting and connectivity solution that met Mondi Packaging’s specific requirements
• Flexible commercial terms, for example with pay-as-you-go data storage charging
• Fully scalable solution backed by strong capability and a track record of success
  

Main BT products and services

• BT co-location hosting and data storage service
• BTnet internet access service