June 2010 Newsletter

Large Pension Fund Provider Gains Productivity with Help from Nexus

Background
Headquartered in West Sacramento, CalSTRS is the second largest pension fund in the United States, with a membership of over 800,000 and over $161 billion in retirement assets managed for California’s teachers. CalSTRS provides three basic benefits: service retirement, survivor, and disability. CalSTRS is responsible for the determination and payment of benefits to members, retirees, and beneficiaries, and for the distribution of information to all members, employers, and other interested groups. At its core, CalSTRS is a financial services company, complete with a stock trading floor.

Catalyst for Change
CalSTRS was in the process of constructing a new 13-story building in West Sacramento with over 400,000 square feet of office space and more than 1,250 work stations. This new building, when complete, would allow CalSTRS to consolidate multiple (dated) leased buildings, improve the work environment for its 1,000+ employees, and provide a better onsite facility through which to service their customers, the teachers of California, their Board of Directors, and the community.

CalSTRS’ old IBM phone system was connected to the state’s Centrex system, which was no longer supported. They also found it frustrating to communicate with each other because their old phone system did not have many of the new features like video conferencing. Since they were funded by the teachers and not by the state, they also wanted to migrate away from the state’s infrastructure and build a new state-of-the-art system that would allow for improved communication between management, their customers other business entities.

Key to the Opportunity
Based on the long standing partner relationship established through the CPR/CPHCS projects, Verizon called upon Nexus for the professional services required to implement the CalSTRS vision. Following a formal RFP process which identified Verizon as the selected vendor, with Nexus as the actual installing company, the Nexus Account Manager and Systems Engineering Manager met with CalSTRS’ IT manager on multiple occasions to finalize the ultimate design. This collaborative effort resulted in an extremely robust solution which sold itself to CalSTRS. As a result of these discussions, CalSTRS agreed to a new system that connected everything from guest access, vendors, voice, video, security, building automation, to wireless, treadmills, lighting control, and vending machines.

Challenges
Nexus was tasked with an “any and all” scope of architecting a company’s technology infrastructure from scratch, and then migrating the whole company (including many satellite buildings) over to the new building – without any loss of services. This required Nexus to meet with both the client and other 3rd party vendors to gather requirements and coordinate access for every single type of device being brought into the new building that would ultimately rely on the new network infrastructure.

• Because of multiple high priority, concurrent projects, Nexus’ resources were already stretched thin. It required considerable coordination between Nexus management across several regions and Nexus PM Morina Dustan in order to assemble the staff appropriate to complete this intense project. Because CalSTRS stood firm on their deadlines, Nexus installers had to coordinate flawlessly and work long hours into the night to meet those client deadlines as well as Nexus deadlines for other projects using the same resources.
• The logistics of physically installing and keeping track of millions of dollars in equipment, which included rack systems for 15 different IDFs, server room, 1,300 phones, 12 servers and dozens of switches was no easy task and required careful attention to detail. Everyone on the team had to closely follow the installation plan, which they did. All equipment was installed and the entire system went online with no unexpected service outages.
• For 6 out of 7 months, the new building was a construction zone; this meant additional procedures to follow with mandatory safety orientation/drug testing for each Nexus employee prior to working on the premises. This requirement for safety training severely restricted the ability to supplement the assigned workforce on an ad hoc basis, further increasing the pressure for the deployment crew to stay on schedule. Additionally, Nexus installers were required to wear hard-hats, safety vests, boots, and safety glasses for the entire duration of all work performed on site prior to cut over. This requirement was both cumbersome and physically challenging for completion of the work of the deployment engineers.
• Prior to the CalSTRS project, Nexus had only installed Cisco’s NAC application on two other occasions. There were very few resources (including Cisco support) that really understood the nuances of configuring this equipment. Kevin Colo took it upon himself to research the system and figure out how to properly install each component. Through his efforts, NAC was successfully deployed and Kevin has significantly increased Nexus’ NAC capabilities.

Results
The deployment was an outstanding success. There were no outages, no technical stumbles, and no Nexus-caused schedule changes through multiple phases, including two major server relocations from CalSTRS’ existing facility and four separate end user moves into the building. Verizon, Cisco, and other vendors such as Network Instruments and Verint all made statements that the CalSTRS network was the most sophisticated, best implemented deployment of its type they had ever seen. One vendor asked to use the CalSTRS project as a model test case example in their literature. The 45 day acceptance period was completed without a single service disruption.

Conclusion
Training, preparedness, and an ability to know how to find resources at the right time all increase the percentages of success for an installation. Some people may look at the huge scope of this project and attribute luck as playing a significant role in our success. The crew assigned to this project knew otherwise. They paid careful attention to every action they took and never lost sight of the big picture. Thanks to the people involved in this installation, Nexus can look at any project, no matter its size, and know that it can be completed with 100% success.

Would You Like Additional Information?
For additional information on this article, please contact your local Nexus Account Manager or email us at connect@nexusis.com.