Search

    • GCSAA improves customer experience, decision-making

      EMC third-platform technologies enable small IT team to improve service delivery, become more agile

    • Customer

      Golf Course Superintendents Association of America

    • Industry

      Professional Association/Travel and Leisure, Hospitality

    • Offerings

      EMC XtremIO all-flash array, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Air

    • Key Challenges

      Traditional storage could not support plans to improve customer experience and decision-making, Expansion required online service delivery

    • Outcomes

      Improved customer service, Data-driven decision-making, Increased agility

    Challenges

    Traditional Storage was Limiting

    The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) is a national association for golf course superintendents and greens keepers that provides education, certification, advocacy, and community to its members. Once serving only the U.S., the organization now serves members around the world.

    GCSAA wanted to improve service delivery to its clients both in the U.S. and worldwide. The association also had accumulated decades of data from which it was not gaining value and wanted to undertake a business intelligence initiative to drive its decision-making. However, GCSAA’s existing traditional storage could not provide the performance necessary to achieve these plans. Therefore, it wanted to consolidate its storage on a high-performance array.

    • GCSAA

  • Our Approach

    Partnering for customer service

    EMC Account Manager, Jennifer Kabler, partnered with Lambert Tomeldan, GCSAA Director of Information Technology, to help the association improve customer service and SLAs and to implement business intelligence for data-driven decision-making.

    Working with EMC, GCSAA moved its tier one applications—including customer facing resources such as learning management and government advocacy, and internal systems such CRM, association management, SharePoint, VDI, and business intelligence—to an EMC XtremIO all-flash array.

    EMC also helped GCSAA create a hybrid cloud and implement a software-defined data center in order to reach a worldwide audience, streamline management for its small IT team, and increase the continuous availability of its services and applications for both its customers and internal users. The hybrid cloud combines both on-premise solutions and the VMware vCloud Air Service. The organization uses vCloud Air for its production web applications that serve its customers around the world.

    •  

    • “Setting up XtremIO was very easy—with EMC support we were up and running in less than a day. We have already experienced cost savings via reduced man-hours focused on storage. And our customers have benefited from faster response times on the various online services and tools they use on a daily basis.”

      Lambert Tomeldan, Director of Information Technology, GCSAA

  • Outcomes

    Improved customer service

    With XtremIO, GCSAA can provide a better customer experience. Customers now enjoy faster response times on various online services such as the learning management system, the government advocacy system, and other GCSAA tools that they use on a day-to-day basis.

    Increased agility

    With hybrid cloud, GCSAA has cut the time to provision servers, applications, and new instances of servers by half and can now serve its international customers. As a result of its new agility, the IT team can provide better service and better SLAs to its internal staff and customers. 

    Data-driven decision-making

    With storage consolidated onto the XtremIO all-flash array, GCSAA can now make decisions based on its vast data resources. The results have been immediate—the time to render reports through GCSAA’s business intelligence initiative has been reduced by 50 percent.