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Q9 delivers 33 months of continuous uptime for Western Inventory Service
Company reaps benefits from outsourcing critical servers
Toronto, ON - January 28, 2004 - In May 2001, Western Inventory Service, the largest inventory data collection specialist in Canada, outsourced the contents of its data centre to Q9 Networks. Since then, the company has experienced 33 months of continuous uptime, including during the blackout affecting Ontario and the U.S. eastern seaboard.
"Before we moved to Q9 we hosted our own IT infrastructure and had no real capability to deal with a disaster," says Paul Jackson, VP, Information Services, Western Inventory Service. "With our company experiencing tremendous growth, we realized a need to focus on our core strengths while providing a more robust environment for our critical systems. Q9 allowed us to do that by providing a secure, state-of-the-art facility and a highly reliable network."
Western Inventory Service offers a variety of data collection, analysis, and on-hand counting services to retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. The firm's total North American client list boasts thousands of companies, representing billions of dollars in merchandise counted and millions of SKUs. Western Inventory Service has offices across Canada and the Eastern United Sates.
"As a data-driven company, we could not do what we do today without Q9," says Jackson. "Our customers often tell me how impressed they are with our IT capabilities. Over the last two-and-a-half years our network has never been unavailable except for scheduled maintenance work. Q9 has made a significant contribution to the success of our business. The icing on the cake was the power outage last August. Our infrastructure was completely unaffected and we maintained normal operations throughout the event."
Q9's sole focus on IT infrastructure allows it to hire, train and retain highly qualified experts in Internet-specific disciplines. Key services are backed with service level agreement (SLA) guarantees for installation time and problem identification and response. These factors enable customers to outsource mission-critical systems to Q9 with complete confidence.
"In today's fast-paced business world, companies should expect and demand reliable infrastructure," says Osama Arafat, CEO, Q9 Networks. "Our services enable customers to realize efficiencies and deliver bottom line results. We are pleased to have contributed to Western Inventory's success."
About Western Inventory Service
Western Inventory Service is the third largest inventory counting service in the world and the only national counting service in Canada. We have been responding to our customers' needs since 1967, providing high quality on hand inventory counts to retailers, wholesale distributors, and manufacturers. For more information,
please visit www.western-inventory.com or www.serviceinventaire.com.
About Q9 Networks
Q9 Networks is the leading provider of outsourced Internet infrastructure and managed hosting services for companies with mission-critical IT operations. Q9 raised $115 million in private equity financing to fund a national network of Internet data centres in major Canadian cities. Q9's data centres and network are engineered for 100 percent uptime with SLA-backed guarantees. Q9 managed services, including: bandwidth, dedicated servers, firewalls, load balancing, Virtual Private Networking (VPN) and back-up/restore, enable the rapid provisioning and scalability of client Internet operations. For more information,
visit the Q9 Web site at www.Q9.com.
For further information, please contact:
Q9 Networks
Kevin Spikes
Manager, Marketing Communications
Toll-Free: 1-888-696-2266 x7211
media.relations@Q9.com
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