“We used to have a few administrators, and all the knowlegde was buried in their heads. With this partnership, we now have a large team at our disposal .” James Haskell, CIO, Fox Racing

The Hurdles in Between
Fox Racing’s IT infrastructure — diverse servers, applications, databases and networks — was inherently complex and therefore, difficult to manage. Even though the company relied heavily on IT for business success, it hogged too much resources and attention, which could have been effectively channeled toward core business activity.

Fox Racing’s IT set up was made up of 140 servers (Windows, Linux, Unix and VMWare), 80 network devices (routers, firewalls, core and non-core switches, load balancers, WAPs, wireless bridged) and 23 applications (MS SQL, MySQL, MS Exchange, VMWare, Web servers, Web applications, SMTP mail, FTP, active directory, File, Print, Citrix and back-up server). “Because we were growing fast, and were trying to meet the increasing demand of motocross apparel consumers, we needed an effective IT system that could make our core task smoother,” says Haskell.

Indeed, there were initial challenges in making the offshore activity work, the biggest one being the phase of cross training between the teams. And, the physical distance between the two teams made things even more difficult. With time and immense commitment from the provider’s side, these challenges were tackled well. And this gave enough confidence to Fox Racing to also hand out some offshore development activity to NetEnrich. Wise from the infrastructure offshoring experience, the company worked on a different approach. “We worked out a plan for site visits ahead of implementation,” adds Haskell.

Advantages on the Sourcing Track
Offshoring proved to a boon to Fox Racing. The company had at its disposal a squad of technology experts whose expertise it could avail whenever required. “We used to have just a few administrators, and all the knowledge and information was buried in their heads. With this partnership, we now have a large team at our disposal, and all the info is now out in the open and more standardized,” adds Haskells.

Apart from costs savings, Fox Racing got a dedicated team providing various IT services.  NetEnrich provides numerous IT-infrastructure services to Fox Racing. These services include “IT infrastructure management services for their servers, networks, storage, and infrastructure applications (e.g. Exchange, Active Directory, DNS, Databases), AppTone Services (application production support and sustenance engineering services) for their mission critical e-commerce application, IT Optimization services — server consolidation, network assessment,” says Raju Chekuri, CEO, NetEnrich.

The time difference between the U.S. and the offshore location — a challenge initially — helped. Together with the onsite support team and the offshore team, it meant availability of support services on a 24x7 basis.

“The relationship between us has been good. There have been challenges as well as learning experiences on both the sides. Both of us worked to solve, and as things were working well, we tried to do more things with them. It’s been a give and take relationship," concludes Haskell.