Presidio Networked Solutions Helps the City of West Palm Beach Upgrade Its IT Systems and Services for New City Center Project

GREENBELT, MD--(Marketwire - June 23, 2009) - As with many other sectors in the US today, state and local entities are moving quickly to find new and innovative ways to use technology to increase effectiveness and reduce costs in meeting community needs. With federal grant and stimulus dollars driving the race, the challenge, notes Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., is to ensure that IT-focused funds are used practically, with the goal being to streamline operational complexities, while conserving resources and reducing operational costs.

To demonstrate this, Presidio, the leading provider of professional and managed services for advanced IT lifecycle solutions, cites its successful collaboration with the City of West Palm Beach, Florida. The City looked to Presidio to expand and restructure its network infrastructure and telephony systems, utilizing virtualization for its New City Center project. At the front end of the project, the City first chose to migrate to a comprehensive Cisco IP-based voice and data infrastructure, thereby avoiding a costly update and expansion of its legacy PBX and telephone systems. The new infrastructure, built on a single network to support its voice and data services, allowed the City to realize identifiable savings of over $700,000 in reduced cabling costs alone, while providing dramatic reductions in operating expenditures within the first year.

"The decision to move to an IP-based telephony system eliminated the need to expand our PBX system and cabling infrastructure, a costly endeavor considering the labor required to install it, the immense space to house it, and the down time necessary to migrate to it," said Chuck Osteen, Communications Manager for the City of West Palm Beach. "Together, these factors would have had a significant negative impact on the City's bottom line, as well as the services that its citizens rely on. With our new datacenter configuration, we were able to split the City's two servers by location, each in a different datacenter, to ensure business continuity during the move and later, in the event of an extended power outage. The servers are fully redundant, which enabled us to make the move with no noticeable interruption in city services. The new configuration ensures that if one server ever fails or is incapacitated, the other will keep our critical systems up and running."

"We have been able to leverage our success in the commercial markets and bring business-enhancing solutions to state agencies and municipalities throughout our region," stated Dale Shilling, Executive Vice President of Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc. "I feel that, with our strong technology background and service culture, Presidio is ahead of the curve by helping public sector customers navigate the waters in planning, designing and deploying new solutions -- to maximize the benefits of virtualization and other solutions."

Among the many benefits of the City's virtualization network strategy are considerable space and energy savings -- with only a few racks in each data center. "While our initial investment was significant, the ROI was nearly tenfold in total savings," said Osteen. "Additional long-term benefits include consolidation of our Bell circuits and the flexibility to easily add, move and change, as the dynamics of the City evolve -- without the addition of station cards or complex wiring changes."

According to Osteen, the design of the new IT infrastructure has also made it possible for the City to achieve a more reliable disaster relief and recovery response plan. In the fallout of a recent major power outage during a hurricane, in which the municipal generators failed, the City relocated its Communications Center from its Emergency Operations Center to the Police Department. "With the IP-based system, set-up at the PD took mere hours instead of days -- and was reconfigured remotely from Phoenix, which would have been impossible if we still relied on a PBX system," he said.

Today, the City of West Palm Beach also benefits from virtualization projects made possible by network infrastructure applications from Presidio partners NetApp and VMware. "A reduction in servers and virtualization tools, including VMware, is currently providing the City savings of over $300,000 in physical servers and an additional $40,000 per year in power consumption alone," said Osteen. "Deduplication solutions from NetApp have reduced our overall data storage requirements by a full terabyte, significantly reducing storage costs and easing the process of moving data between servers. Additional savings are being realized from a datacenter cooling design made possible by the City's continued collaboration with Presidio, which directs the building's air management system to cool critical servers and other rack-based equipment that need it -- rather than paying to cool the entire datacenter."

"State and local governments around the country today are in a position to replicate West Palm Beach's success with its major infrastructure build-out," said Joel Schleicher, CEO of Presidio Networked Solutions. "Grants and other stimulus-driven opportunities are available to help entities undergo long-needed IT upgrades that provide a high return on investment, while making possible a raft of new services. Presidio is positioned to help find grants that will allow our customers to structure their technology infrastructure for efficiency and scalability, enabling them to overcome the limitations of legacy systems that are destined for obsolescence."

As a trusted provider of professional and managed services to government entities at every level, Presidio is well positioned to help government organizations utilize IT-focused stimulus dollars prudently, with the goal of improving their technology infrastructure and services. Additional components of Presidio's lifecycle portfolio include Presidio Managed Networks and Presidio Technology Capital. Presidio Managed Networks enables companies to out-task their network and device management, allowing IT personnel to focus on internal initiatives that will ultimately benefit the business. Presidio Technology Capital assists businesses with the financial aspects of procuring advanced technology solutions, providing adaptable financial solutions that include capital preservation, predictive technology refresh and flexible programs such as FAS 13 operating leases, off-balance-sheet leasing, project financing and equipment decommissioning.

About Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc.

Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of advanced IT lifecycle solutions, addresses the complete technology lifecycle -- plan, design, integrate, operate and optimize -- for the enterprise, commercial and government markets. Presidio's comprehensive solutions portfolio comprises unified communications, wireless, security, storage, network infrastructure and managed services. Holding the highest networking industry certifications from vendor partners Cisco, IBM, HP, Sun, EMC, NetApp, VMware and Microsoft, Presidio Networked Solutions is well-positioned to meet the growing needs of customers migrating to advanced technologies. Presidio also offers customers an extensive range of financing solutions, including leasing. For more information visit: www.presidio.com.

Presidio Networked Solutions is a trademark of Presidio, Inc. Other trade names used in this document are acknowledged to be the properties of their respective owners.

Contact Information: Contacts: Gary Good Trainer Communications (707) 837-1718 pre@trainercomm.com Todd Brinegar Presidio Networked Solutions (301) 313-2086 tbrinegar@presidio.com