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Adidas Canada's headquarters in Concorde, Ont., just north of Toronto, supports a head office of about 120 staff; a high-tech distribution facility serving 4,000 retail outlets from Brantford, Ont., with a staff of about 100; a 30-seat call centre in suburban Montreal; a small showroom in Burnaby, B.C.; about 50 sales reps flogging the Adidas and Taylor Made Golf lines across the country, and a fast-growing owned-retail arm operating 12 stores, with a flagship store still to open at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto - "The Times Square of Toronto," as CIO Paul Leone puts it.
It's a lot of data to back up, not just from its IBM AS/400 running Active Directory Exchange Server, but also from its complement of Wintel desktops and servers. There's also a high level of automation in the Brantford warehouse and in-house developed supply chain and customer- and employee-facing Web applications.
"At the middle of everything we do for the most part from an application standpoint is an AS/400 platform and an Active Directory Exchange platform that we've implemented through the global Adidas Group standard," Leone says. "There's a lot of other servers and technologies that we have, but the AS 400 really drives the order fulfillment supply chain side."
With an IT staff of 13 - most at head office, with lone support people at the warehouse and call centre - it made sense to Leone to job out the headache of keeping data backups up-to-date to an external supplier. About four years ago, the company gave that job to Toronto-based Storagepipe.
"We've been able to set up with Storagepipe the ability...