OTHER SUCCESS STORIES
EBSA
Generalidades
EBSA – EMPRESA DE ENERGÍA DE BOYACÁ
EBSA S.A. E.S.P., is a Colombian domiciliary public-utilities, mixed company that covers the department (state) of Boyacá, supplying electric power to approximately 450,000 users; currently, it has 550 active employees.
Entity
With sixty-one years of history, Empresa de Energía de Boyacá – EBSA S.A. is categorized as one of the most important entities of the region, because it provides the electric power public service to 450,000+ users. Coverage of the entire department (state) in the commercial, industrial and residential sectors. Its good management is reflected in the growth of its operations, with a distribution system that benefits rural and urban areas in 123 municipalities of the department (state) of Boyacá.
The company works under a philosophy of quality seeking continuous improvement and the evolution in its product portfolio, to be able to provide an efficient service to its clients. EBSA received ISO 9001:2000 certification from CIDET; further, it was re-certified in 2007 and 2008 by the same entity.
Challenge
The technology infrastructure of EBSA kept growing with the years, due to the acquisition of systems to support different applications and services of the entity. The company developed a strategy to modernize its information systems and communication networks to offer better performance to the business operations.
Within this strategy, a need was detected to update the IBM servers platform, which has been operating at the entity during several years. Further, it was included the acquisition of a better storage system that corresponded to the data volume that the entity handles.
Solution
To overcome all these challenges, EBSA developed a series of modernization projects; for that purpose, made calls to different providers who have presence in the Colombian market. Redsis participated and it was awarded both the network infrastructure and the servers projects.
EBSA received from Redsis a “turn-key” solution, with all the knowledge and experience that its engineers could provide to design, implement EBSA’s entire network infrastructure, as well as modernize the servers, and implement the new storage solutions required.
The entity changed several servers for same-line equipment but more powerful and with greater processing capacity. All the latter with the purpose of strengthening the platform for the commercial applications and SAP – the ERP solution that the company acquired. Likewise, solutions were installed for data compression and high availability; all with IBM technology. This project started in January 2016 and finished in August 2016.
Benefits
“All these projects are focused on business continuity, i.e., that the user can access to the different applications with no interruptions given the possibility of one of the servers being down, because it is immediately assisted by another server. Provide high-availability was fundamental for this project; all services of the commercial area now count with four nodes in two servers. This make feasible that, if any of the two should fail, it will be replaced by the following; further, if the entire computing center in the city of Tunja would collapse, the computing center in the city of Sogamoso would enter into operation”, explained Engineer Gilberto Calderón Baez, Information Technology Director in EBSA.
Response times improved in all processes by a high percentage, to a great extent, thanks to the modernization of the storage systems which had nearly 10 years in operation. “The level of acceptance was very high because by increasing the network’s speed, Internet access and access to the applications improved, something that users notice immediately. The IT strategy is to conduct a rotation of the equipment every certain time, and for that reason, we prepare to make the updates considered pertinent when the equipment completes their useful life cycle”, explains the engineer.
Redsis and EBSA have had a longstanding business relationship and the results expected in each project have been attained both at technology and business levels. “Redsis has given us confidence because they have suitable personnel, have complied with the objectives and with competitive investment proposals that provide us a quicker return on investment”, concludes the engineer.