A Belief in Mutual Success

You might not know it, but you’ve probably encountered Golden State Foods (GSF) dozens of times, if not hundreds. That’s just fine by GSF: It likes to keep the spotlight on its customers.

One of the largest diversified suppliers to the food-service industry, GSF supplies meat patties, condiments, syrups, produce, baked goods and other items to quick-service restaurants such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Arby’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Denny’s and other food industry leaders.

In total, GSF services more than 20,000 restaurants in over 50 countries on six continents. GSF’s philosophy is simple: When its customers succeed, GSF succeeds.

Rapid growth

Over time, GSF had grown very quickly to support customer growth, resulting in a vastly decentralized IT landscape. The company had 27 mini-data centers spread throughout the United States supporting its distribution and food processing operations.

“Every time we added a new distribution center, we’d have to buy a whole new set of hardware to support that new location,” explains Rhonda Sias, chief information officer of GSF. “That approach was no longer sustainable if we wanted to maintain our growth trajectory.”

One of the first things Sias did upon her arrival was to undertake a strategic assessment of the IT landscape at GSF. She realized that in order to provide the very best customer service, the company needed to adopt an infrastructure that provided IT “as a service,” with greater speed, flexibility and reliability.

“I’ve always been a fan of what I call leapfrogging: anticipating what direction technology is moving towards so that you can stay ahead of the curve,” says Sias. “When I started to think about what kind of centralized infrastructure we needed to adopt, it became clear that what we needed was a cloud infrastructure.”

The ideal partners for the cloud

To undertake a project of this scope, GSF wanted to make sure it had the right partners to help it succeed. After a rigorous RFP process, GSF selected CSC, a global leader in providing technology-enabled business solutions and services, as its implementation partner. Tightly partnered with VMware, the industry leader and innovator in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, CSC was ideally positioned to make IT “as a service” a reality for GSF.

“We chose CSC because we had a lot of faith in their ability to get the job done,” says Sias. “Also, the fact that they’ve been in business so long — managing highly confidential government and defense projects, no less — really proved to me that CSC had what it takes to secure our information in the cloud.”

GSF was also swayed by the technologies — provided by VMware, EMC, VCE and other technology partners — underlying CSC’s cloud offering.

“The fact that CSC utilizes VMware technology played into our decision 100 percent,” says Sias. “When you’re shifting into a leading-edge area like the cloud, you have to ask: ‘Who’s supporting this platform?’ If there hadn’t been such a strong coalition of companies, I don’t think we would have moved forward as confidently as we did.”

Aligning IT with business

CSC deployed CSC CloudCompute, a VMware vCloud® Data center Service, to help consolidate and centralize GSF‟s IT infrastructure, establishing private clouds for GSF at a primary data center in Newark, Del., and a secondary data center in Chicago, Ill.

CSC manages the clouds so that GSF simply consumes resources as it would a utility, a model that delivers speed and flexibility while helping align IT with the business.

“We can get a new distribution center up and running in a matter of weeks rather than three to five months,” says Sias. “Eliminating that bottleneck is good for business all around. If we can quickly launch a new Starbucks distribution center that can start servicing another 150 stores, that helps our customers grow — which helps us grow.”

Looking forward

As it moves forward and looks for other ways to leverage the cloud, GSF is happy to have a partner that can continue to grow with it and support it over time.

“We selected CSC not only as our implementation partner, but also as our managed services provider, because we view CSC as a long-term partnership,” says Sias. “Any relationship begins and ends with trust, and CSC has proven itself time and time again.”

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