Dell End-to-End Solutions Fuel Jenkon’s Business

Solutions from Dell, Inc. enable Vancouver, Washington-based Jenkon to support the sales forces of recognized brands through specialized web services and turnkey software.

Due to the effectiveness of its cloud-based Software-as-a-Subscription (SaaS) solutions, Jenkon’s customers which include many Fortune Global 500 companies are increasingly engaging Jenkon’s portfolio of software products on a subscription basis.

With billions of dollars of commerce at stake for customers such as Avon, Unilever, The Body Shop and Tupperware, it is paramount that Jenkon’s supporting infrastructure remains secure and readily available for its customers’ sales forces. Jenkon turned to Dell as a partner when the company’s previous technology vendor could not provide solutions that supported its rapid growth and future strategy.

“Across all our clients, the number of direct sales consultants who engage Jenkon’s services is in the multi-millions, and we provide them not only portals to track sales and commissions, but also many thousands of websites where their customers can order products and services,” said Steve Shinsel, director of IT, Jenkon. “Uptime and availability are everything to these customers, but our previous IT scalability had physical limits and we lacked multi-layered redundancies critical to support the company’s vision, our exponential growth and market opportunities. That’s when Dell stepped-up.“

Leveraging Dell solutions, Jenkon began overhauling its IT infrastructure and implementing best practices, starting by optimizing all customer databases away from Jenkon’s collocated production environment to its development and quality assurance environment. That required scrubbing and copying more than 100 databases, some of which could take 13 hours to transfer over a WAN. After installing a Dell SonicWALL WXA 4000 WAN Acceleration Appliance, the largest databases were transferred in under an hour. The SonicWALL WXA solution saved Jenkon more than just time; the company is paying for two-thirds less bandwidth while getting more performance.

To ensure customers’ sales data is protected from threats, Jenkon deployed a SonicWALL E-Class NSA next-generation firewall, enabling granular control and greater network visibility to protect each client’s data with finely tuned settings. The built-in VPN capabilities allow Jenkon to securely connect the company’s two data center locations and SonicWALL Mobile Connect enables their customers’ direct sales forces the means to access their services via tablets and smartphones.

To ensure its SQL Server database environments deliver performance, Jenkon uses Dell Software’s Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise monitoring solution. With Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise, Jenkon’s database administrators can monitor the health and performance of their SQL Server environments anytime, anywhere, and thanks to the Spotlight mobile app, from any device, enabling the team to identify potential performance issues before they surface. Once Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise finds an issue, employees can then use the SonicWALL Mobile Connect app to VPN into the office and manage servers directly-all while working remotely from their smartphones. In addition, Jenkon uses Dell Software’s LiteSpeed for SQL Server backup, compression and restore solution, enabling the company to backup and move SQL Server data across their environment.

Additionally, Jenkon is able to offer customers higher levels of support since implementing Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell networking switches at its dual IT environments. Jenkon’s databases had previously run on antiquated, physical servers. Now that Jenkon’s racks are comprised of PowerEdge servers, the company has hundreds of VMs running on them and can support customer database development, customer staging and DR.

Dell EqualLogic storage is the final piece of the IT overhaul. Previous storage was not fast enough to keep up with Jenkon’s applications. EqualLogic allows these same applications to run at ten times their previous speed, enabling Jenkon to use fewer resources on the servers while providing a better product to its customers.

“Some of the most successful companies in the world trust Jenkon to support their sales staffs both because of the proficiency and reliability of their SaaS offering,” said Matt Baker, executive director of enterprise strategy, Dell. “The end-to-end breadth of Dell’s solutions approach brings accelerated benefit to Jenkon’s IT environment, benefitting their customers and their business overall. Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage, Dell Networking switches, Dell Software and Dell SonicWALL work together to provide Jenkon greater agility, availability, security and performance that scales with them as they continue to grow.“

“As a hosting company, it’s critical that our business applications be highly available for our customers at all times,” said Shinsel. “Our new environment has not only shortened development cycles but allowed us to deliver an even better customer experience. We can scale to any size that our customer requires and manage any environment globally.“

With Jenkon’s dual IT hosting environment implementation realized through Dell’s end-to-end enterprise solutions, the company can ensure that its SLAs meet greater uptime requirements, allowing Jenkon to expand the market for its SaaS-based offerings.