Credit Union Central of Saskatchewan (CUCS)

A leading financial co-operative, CUCS values the gains in productivity and reliability from working with ISM Canada since it outsourced its internal LAN operations several years ago.

In 1997, Credit Union Central of Saskatchewan, a financial cooperative that supplies services to credit unions throughout the province, faced a major challenge: an out-of-date local area network (LAN) that regularly experienced server failures and long periods of unavailability to end users.

"In the latter part of the 1990s, we decided it made sense to outsource our IT work and focus those resources on our primary business of financial services," explains Jim Belteck, Manager, Information Technology, Credit Union Central of Saskatchewan. "Our biggest issue was attracting and retaining the IT people needed to run a small shop when technology was not our primary business. Productivity was suffering as our LAN was failing on a regular basis. That's why we made the decision to outsource virtually our entire internal LAN to an IT partner."

"We chose ISM Canada and IBM for two primary reasons: 1) ISM Canada offered proven local resources and people who would be managing the day-to-day account, and 2) The global depth of IBM Global Services meant that they would be able to offer us a wide range of services and support into the future."

"Since ISM Canada took over our LAN, the productivity improvements have been quite dramatic. We have gone from a network that was unreliable and inconsistent to a network that has had approximately 99.99 per cent uptime over the past three years."