Empire Theatres

"Tenzing helped us migrate into their services from our other hosting provider with the minimum of fuss. Throughout the whole deployment they were there for us every step of the way. We had some initial 'teething' troubles with our new application which their engineers helped to diagnose with our application developer! It was a great team between many different parties and Tenzing helped us every step of the way going above and beyond your traditional Managed Service Provider." - Daron Wong, National Director of Technology

About the Customer

Empire Theaters is Canada's second largest and fastest growing film exhibition company with 50 theaters (plus 1 drive-in) across 8 provinces in Canada. It offers traditional film exhibition as well as other content using digital and satellite capabilities. With the deployment of its next generation customer service portal and payment gateway, Empire Theaters needed a managed services provider they could trust to deliver this business-critical application to Canadian movie goers.

Project Scope

Empire Theater's key business requirements included:

A trusted partner with the resources to deliver a reliable, scalable and secure solution in time for the rapidly approaching launch date
Assessment services to understand their business requirements, ITSM capabilities and the technical requirements of their hybrid Windows and Linux application
Seamless collaboration with their Application Development Firm
Solutions Engineering services to design the optimum IT Infrastructure and ITSM plan
Deployment Services to configure, document and test their multi-tier, hybrid Windows and Linux application on the new hosting Infrastructure
Ongoing Capacity Management to address spikes in traffic around marketing events
24x7x365 Incident and Problem Management services backed by meaningful SLA's.

Tenzing's Empire Theatres Solution

Tenzing's Summit with Tenzing service model addresses each of Empire Theaters' business requirements. The collaborative aspect of this approach, which starts with an honest and detailed assessment of the customer's requirements and capabilities to plan the best path forward, was the key to success. Tenzing's Technical Account Manager worked very closely with Empire Theaters and their Application Development Firm throughout the assessment, design, and deployment phases. With this continuity, a good plan, and access to the right subject matter expertise and technical resources at the right time, the project was a success.

The technical details of the solution include:

Assessment, consulting and training services to help Empire Theatres and its Application Development Partner make the deployment deadline
Tuning services to improve application stability and performance
Highly scalable and fault tolerant, multi-tier web, application and database infrastructure
Integration of corporate payment gateways and video streaming services
Hybrid application framework with Red Hat, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Windows, IIS, .Net, SQLServer
Clustered SQLServer services
Enterprise SAN services using redundant Fibre Channel links to an HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 6000 SAN
Customized local and remote backup policies to meet Empire Theater's requirements for data retention and restoration times
Custom application monitoring and notification configuration
Custom escalation processes and procedures
Custom Service Level Agreement

The Results

The process and partnership between Tenzing, Empire Theatres and their development partner resulted in this complex project going live on schedule. Moreover, by leveraging Tenzing's existing expertise and resource, Empire Theatres was able to achieve an enterprise-class solution for its business-critical application at a fraction of the cost of building this capacity in-house and with significant savings over the prices quoted by leading hosting providers with less comprehensive and collaborative approached to managed IT services.