The customer is a Just in Time manufacturer, touching on various industries and products. Initially, the customer was part of a larger family-owned organization. In 2017, some of the family decided to sell off their ownership, but one family member wanted to remain in the business. They planned to sell off most of their locations and relied on CornerStone to support the network and PBX segmentation project. Over time, the new organization has engaged CornerStone for other projects.

In an interesting case, the customer’s transition from an international manufacturing organization with roughly 1,200 employees and eight locations to two sites and 200 employees required significant planning and redesign engagement. CornerStone supported the customer’s carrier, network, and phone infrastructure.

Carrier – the original customer had high availability data connections and a handful of point-to-point circuits with us. We had to negotiate with AT&T, Spectrum, and the legacy infrastructure that composes Lumen to contract services to the two new corporate identities. In tandem with handling the contracts, we redesigned the carrier infrastructure to maintain a high availability and access diversity, as some locations relied on private PTPs. Lastly, we supported the customer with migrating DIDs between the organizations’ SIP solutions.

Network—The customer had a Cisco router and firewall (DMVPN) deployed to the edge for routing purposes. We were engaged to help redesign the routing tables between locations, protecting privileged data from being inadvertently shared. In tandem with the carrier project, we were also required to redesign routing policies for the new entity.

Phones—The customer had a ShoreTel on-premise system, with its central hosting server at the original company’s HQ. We were engaged to run several firmware and software upgrades to keep the system up to date, working with the customer’s IT staff to run Windows Server OS migrations. We then split the system into two organizations, working with the PBX manufacturer and customer to virtualize new servers and deploy new voice switches.

Working with CornerStone, the customer had identified a switching lifecycle project. At the time, their core and distribution switches exceeded ten years in production. The customer requested that CornerStone assist them with migrating from their legacy HP switches to a new solution, asking that we negotiate on their behalf with both Cisco and Aruba. We ran through several rounds of negotiations with each vendor to secure the highly aggressive discounting of the customer as a part of our consulting engagement. Ultimately, we saved the customer nearly $100,000 against industry standard rates.

We provided two unique designs to each Manufacturer, leveraging their strengths when building the entire network topologies. Upon review of each detailed network design, the customer settled on the Aruba solution and proceeded with the order. We then were engaged to engineer the MDFs, IDFs, and fiber core powering their server infrastructure. Our team physically installed the MDFs and server cores while the customer installed the IDFs. We collaborated with their team to successfully cut over to the new network and have remained engaged for any questions they have had.

The customer had engaged CornerStone to find savings for the IT department across all spending categories. We were able to find a handful of opportunities to secure the savings with limited effort on IT’s part.

Microsoft—At the time of engagement, the customer was purchasing licensing directly from Microsoft. CornerStone maintains wholesale rates based on our business, which we run through several technology distributors. We were able to pass the savings on to our customer, providing a $$$$$ savings annually. The exchange took less than 30 minutes of the customer’s time and had no impact on their Microsoft services.

SentinelOne—The customer was looking at a variety of EDR solutions and had asked CornerStone to assist with the sourcing process. They eventually settled on SentinelOne, an industry-leading endpoint security provider. CornerStone assisted the customer with negotiating competitive rates lower than what could be found elsewhere for an organization of their size.

End User Security Training – The customer wanted to implement an end-user phishing and security awareness training program but couldn’t deploy and manage the services in-house. CornerStone was engaged to find a managed solution that’d proactively run phishing campaigns, report on success/failure rates, and implement customer-specific training sessions. We eventually aligned a managed Cofense solution with the customer, which has taken many hours off the IT team’s plate.

Recommendation letters and reference calls are available on request.