TEAM Truck Centres - IBM Client Reference Video

Headquartered in London, Ontario, TEAM Truck Centres has been a regional full-service dealer of new and used heavy and medium duty trucks of all shapes and sizes for the past 35 years. The company provides services and parts from four locations in southwestern Ontario, Canada, to customers who operate truck fleets 24 hours a day, seven days a week across North America. As a result, TEAM Truck needs to be able to provide parts, maintenance and other support services in a timely basis. Additionally, TEAM Truck manages fleets for trucking companies to ensure their trucks are properly serviced on schedule.

Video Transcript

Mark Robinson, VP,CFO, Team Truck: Our tagline, our key commitment to our customers is: “Keeping their business rolling.”

Joe Harp, IT Manager, Team Truck: Team Truck Centers sells Class A truck transports…We sell service for all makes and models of trucks. We sell parts. We sell leasing, finance, and insurance.

Robinson: Team Truck Centres, which has been in business 35 years, is a distributor of Freightliner and Western Star heavy- and medium-duty trucks. So we provide sales, service, and parts support.

Our territory is in southwestern Ontario so we have locations in London, Sarnia, Windsor, and Kitchener. Our customers run heavy trucks all over North America.

We were having a lot of situations where our IT department was putting out fires. They were constantly responding to users who had situations where they were locked up.

Harp: Our previous systems were at the end of life. They were out of warranty…Our cabinets at our data center were getting very full.

Robinson: We needed someone who…could offer a higher level of technical expertise to not only help us in terms of this major upgrade from our existing outdated server farm, but to lead us into the next generation of machines.

Rob Cunha, Sales Manager, Next Dimension: In our initial dealings with Team Truck where we sat down with them and gathered the requirements, we worked extensively with IBM to review and cover those requirements.

Harp: Next Dimension provided to us a solution from IBM.

They told me about the BladeCenter S, and everything about the BladeCenter S was everything we needed. It was perfect for us.

Hutton: IBM’s solution for Team Truck was very cost effective. There were competitive quotes…The solution with IBM …came in actually at a lesser price with more redundancy and fault tolerance built in. So in our eyes and Team Truck’s eyes it was almost a no brainer.

Harp: I have been involved in many, many upgrades and this is the smoothest one I have ever had in my life. …I had zero downtime.

Hutton: The solution that we provided was kind of what we deemed “an office in a box.”

The whole box is fully redundant.

With the BladeCenter S there is no point of failure whatsoever. So their business continuity and the uptime has been increased to almost 100%.

And everything is all in one, and you can basically set up your VMware environment, which is what we did. It’s a virtualization software that allows them to create virtual machines and save a lot of space and save a lot of time and effort in terms of setting up servers. The storage is internal and works very, very well with the virtualization. It actually allows them to allocate space to all their data and then basically everything is backed up through that system server as well.

We know if one of the blades do go down, the software will then move over the virtual servers onto another blade which then will have enough space on there to actually house the servers while the physical blade gets fixed.

Harp: With the IBM Management Console and alerting ability, it can alert us to issues well before they get out of hand.

Hutton: The cost savings that have been achieved by the IBM solution, first off has to do with rack space.

Harp: We pulled six servers into three blades and virtualized them.

Hutton: So maintenance is cut down in half. Heating, hydro, and cooling system has cut down drastically…

Harp: The IBM BladeCenter will allow us to expand without adding more hardware. So we can add another 12 to 15 servers into that, which is very much a cost savings.

Robinson: The IBM solution has provided peace of mind…in that I know that I am not going to have a phone call where…a customer is upset because our systems are down, unable to support their business, unable to keep their business rolling.

Hutton: IBM’s solution has provided a very happy customer in Team Truck… It’s a very good relationship and it’s going to continue to grow as Team Truck grows.

Robinson: I can sleep at night because the systems are going to be up and running. And they’re not going to be up and running just during the business day, they’re going to be up and running seven days a week, 24 hours a day.