-
Advantage Communications Group partners with Wiley to lead the digital transformation effort and is tasked with ongoing network and expense management activities
Port Washington, NY - September 29, 2021 - Advantage Communications Group, a managed service provider (MSP) for communications technology, has completed a global IT transformation project for John Wiley & Sons, Inc (“Wiley”). Wiley, a multinational publishing company for educational institutions around the world has converted 40 global sites to the new technology, resulting in easier day-to-day management, increased reliability and resiliency, and reduced costs.
“This was a fantastic collaborative effort between Advantage and Wiley to quickly put together the right architecture and operating model, combined with the right providers for the business case,” said Steve Rome, co-founder & chief revenue officer at Advantage. “The ongoing global pandemic offered us no favors in regard to the timeline, but we worked together to achieve quick results and achieve a mutually beneficial, ongoing relationship.”
Due to the architecture of their legacy MPLS technology, Wiley had frequent internal challenges managing a network that spanned five continents and was supplied by more than 40 providers. Reliability and resiliency of the network suffered while costs continually increased. They knew it was time to make a change and transform their IT network to better serve the business. Advantage led a design and sourcing process to propose a comprehensive solution that accomplished three tasks: 1) Increase network reliability, 2) ease operational and administrative burden, and 3) reduce the recurring cost of the network.
“We could have continued to operate as-is, but we needed to enable the business in a variety of ways that the legacy technology couldn’t deliver,” said Anthony Lloyd, vice president global infrastructure at Wiley. “At the same time, we didn’t have the resources internally to pull off a transformation effort, so we enlisted the experts at Advantage to help at each stage of the process. We’re now in a position to be far more competitive in our marketplace.”
After design and sourcing, Advantage led the project implementation and changeover activities while centralizing management in their technology lifecycle optimization platform, Command Center, for ongoing inventory visibility and expense management services. The result rationalized Wiley’s 40+ global providers to less than ten and transformed them to a state-of-the-art, dual-node, fully managed SDWAN/SASE solution providing 24x7x365 proactive monitoring/break-fix and resulting in more than $3 million in annual cost reduction.
Watch Anthony tell his story here or visit the Advantage YouTube Channel.
About Wiley
Wiley is a global leader in research and education, unlocking human potential by enabling discovery, powering education, and shaping workforces. For over 200 years, Wiley has fueled the world’s knowledge ecosystem. Today, our high-impact content, platforms, and services help researchers, learners, institutions, and corporations achieve their goals in an ever-changing world. Visit us at Wiley.com, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.