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MJ Flood Technology and Onyx Partner in Race Against Waste

MJ Flood Technology, a leading provider of consultancy and network infrastructure solutions today announced a €200,000 deal with the country’s largest waste management and recycling company, Onyx.

Under the terms of the agreement, MJ Flood Technology has upgraded the company’s Wide Area Network (WAN) to an MPLS* or private network backbone, and deployed Citrix™ thin client facilitating the rollout of Onyx’s business process software from headquarters in Dublin to 7 sites. The completion of the project has allowed Onyx to streamline its waste management operations, resulting in significant employee productivity gains, lower telecommunications costs and reduced desktop administration overheads.

Handling over 525,000 tonnes of commercial, industrial and domestic waste per annum, Onyx operates in a market which is extremely competitive and subject to stringent regulatory requirements. Delivery of the company’s new business process application, “DIVA” was a top priority and a key driver for the project as Business Analyst, Justin McEntee, Onyx explains. “DIVA is a mission-critical business application controlling everything from transport to logistics and invoicing. Rolling it out to over 80 employees presented us with significant challenges in terms of reaching regional depots and guaranteeing resilience and performance levels to users.”

James Finglas, Sales Director, MJ Flood Technology outlines how they approached the project. “We migrated Onyx to an MPLS or private backbone through eircom. This gives them the required flexibility and bandwidth for application rollout and unlike leased lines negates the need for major capital expenditure to terminate endpoints. There is a 2 MB MPLS pipe to headquarters with multiple MPLS nodes servicing Onyx’s regional depots. Endpoints are terminated with Cisco routers offering ISDN as back-up. The solution is completely scaleable and other sites can be easily added to the network at minimal cost.”

At headquarters, MJ Flood Technology performed an upgrade to Windows Active Directory Servers. Staff then installed and configured a Citrix server farm to deliver the DIVA application to the desktop. Citrix provides an application deployment platform that is secure and resilient by design. It centralises access to applications and enables IT staff to deliver enterprise resources on demand. Computer Associate’s BrightStor ArcServe product provides full back-up capabilities for applications and files.

“The Citrix platform not only delivers Onyx’s mission-critical application,” explains Ken O’Toole, Senior Consultant, MJ Flood Technology. “It also helps to extend the life of workstations and centralises desktop management. IT staff can now perform desktop upgrades centrally at the push of a button without having to configure each individual client. This achieves significant cost and productivity efficiencies.”

MJ Flood Technology’s credentials were thoroughly vetted by Onyx’s parent company in France as part of the tender process. “We were impressed by their technical expertise and commitment to getting the job done”, comments Justin McEntee. “Working with a trusted technology partner who understands the intricacies of our business environment resulted in a speedy and seamless project rollout achieving all of our key IT objectives.”

Editors’ Notes: MPLS – Multiprotocol Label Switching

MPLS is a switching method that forwards IP traffic using a label. This label instructs the routers and the switches in the network where to forward the packets based on pre-established IP routing information. Eircom offers various forms of MPLS or private connectivity known as Business IP or BIP.