Riding the wave of the African technology explosion, Nikon South Africa, the regional African centre of the leading global optic technology company, was experiencing rapid growth in demand for its digital technology and exploring the possibility of offering cloud services so its customers could upload, centralise and save their digital images.
But Nikon South Africa’s ambitions were being thwarted by its outdated IT infrastructure. The South Africa office was running the business for the whole continent on one server. If one application on the server had an incident, the whole IT structure, and consequently the business, suffered. Lacking an in-house IT department, Nikon South Africa turned to Dell partner Xpand IT.

“Nikon’s ultimate vision is to offer its customers an end-to-end digital technology solution, enabling their customers to capture images and then save and them through the cloud,” says Steven Preston, MD of Xpand IT. “What Nikon lacked was its own end-to-end technology infrastructure to enable them to provide comprehensive digital imaging solutions to their customers.”

After assessing solutions from leading IT competitors, including HP, Xpand IT opted for the Dell solution because of its scalability and mission-critical service support.

“Since implementing the Dell solution, we have streamlined business processes, resulting in improved efficiency, customer satisfaction and reduced downtime,” says Dewald Maree, Nikon South Africa’s IT manager. “It will also enable us to host in the cloud and facilitate the continued growth of our business.”

Nikon South Africa has deployed a mixture of Dell hardware and software including:
* Two Dell PowerEdge R 720 servers;
* One Dell PowerEdge R520 server;
* One Dell PowerVault TL2000 tape library;
* One Dell Powervault MD3620f SAN;
* Two Dell-Brocade FC8 switches;
* ProSupport; and
* Next business day.

“Dell is focused on delivering the right solutions to customers and enabling them to focus on efficiently running their business without worrying whether the IT infrastructure can support its objectives,” says Ebrahim Hanslo, Dell South Africa channel development manager.