Engineering & Exploration
Most businesses have to make critical decisions under great time pressure. For engineering and exploration industries, this is especially challenging because sites supplying data may be extremely remote, with little or no infrastructure. The specialists evaluating the data are often not on site, and need to collaborate with colleagues worldwide, before making their high risk, potentially costly decisions.
Cable&Wireless Worldwide provides a vital service for many such organisations, including seven of the world's ten largest oil and gas exploration companies. We help them collaborate and operate more effectively by enabling their communications across the globe - in the remotest parts of Africa, Russia, Middle East, Asia Pacific, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, as well as Europe and the Americas.
LOCAL EXPERTISE, WORLDWIDE CONNECTIONS
With our global network and strong relationships with local providers, we provide the communication links you need. These include high-speed data networking through sub-sea cables around the world, managed international satellite services and local microwave, radio, and IP video conferencing. We project manage all of these services with our extensive knowledge of local regulatory and licensing issues, and the restrictions of geography and culture. As these are industries where speed of response is especially critical, we guarantee our performance with rigorous SLAs.
HIGH-SPEED DATA ENHANCES PRODUCTION
Our experience in Angola further demonstrates our capabilities. As they began offshore production there, several of the world's major oil operating companies looked to improve their operating efficiency, using more advanced techniques. This would only be possible with high-speed, reliable access to centralised resources in Europe and the US.
They presented Cable&Wireless Worldwide with the challenge of delivering the fastest international data networks ever deployed into Angola. We drew on our success with Nigeria's Bonny Island project to deliver the high-speed networks, providing class-leading technology which dramatically improved our clients' production capabilities.
PROTECTING MARGINS, IMPROVING PROSPECTS
Although engineering and exploration projects are often huge, costs are still critical. For a large international design and engineering consultancy, an urgent need to cut costs and improve performance resulted in them asking Cable&Wireless Worldwide to review their fragmented IT infrastructure.
After several mergers and acquisitions, their IT environment was disparate and inefficient. The email infrastructure, for example, comprised more than 50 exchange servers, in many different locations. Management was complex and time consuming, and support was very costly.
We created a programme to centralise our customer's infrastructure and applications, with the initial focus on three core global applications: Exchange, ERP and Business Collaborator. We upgraded them to Exchange 2007, allowing the widest possible deployment of Outlook 2007, with a simultaneous Office 2007 desktop refresh. We also upgraded their WAN around a Cable&Wireless Worldwide secure data centre, with high-speed internet access giving all staff quick, easy and secure access to key applications.
By reducing complexity and increasing productivity, we've helped this engineering design consultancy improve operating efficiency and protect their margins. Crucially, we've also cut their Total Cost of Ownership for IT by 40%, and by establishing a predictable cost base, created an effective platform for future expansion.
