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An advanced, infrastructure managed service, capable of supporting the diverse and complex operational computing environment of Sun International, southern Africa’s leading resort and casino chain with total confidence and absolute reliability.

Done.

With a single point of contact service desk and managed service from Unisys, Sun International now has a stable, fully available computing environment and a cost predictable and flexible support function; capable of rapidly resolving IT infrastructure and desktop support requirements across the Group’s multiple resorts and casinos in southern Africa.

Sun International

Founded in 1983 Sun International is the leading resort and casino operator in southern Africa. The Group trades through a number of different corporate structures in order to facilitate regional ownership. All the Group’s operations in southern Africa are managed by
Sun International Management Limited (SIML).

Recognized globally for its quality of service, Sun International hotels and resorts offer customers a unique African experience, with each resort and hotel appropriately styled to complement its environment and introduce a sense of adventure to every client.

Sun International is the only significant operator of superior luxury hotels and major resorts in southern Africa, a focus initiated with its first hotel at the internationally acclaimed Sun City Resort in 1979. The success of these resorts and hotels lies in their appeal to the
international markets and their ability to continue to attract customers from the domestic market. The Palace of the Lost City, The Table Bay and The Royal Livingstone are all members of The Leading Hotels of the World.

Sun International has extensive experience in the development and management of large gaming and entertainment facilities.With a primary emphasis on the customer, the Group has a well-established loyalty programme - Most Valued Guest (MVG) - which has a current database of more than 365,000 active and rated players. In addition, the Group, which relies heavily on cutting-edge technologies, enjoys a distinct competitive advantage with its fully integrated coin-less gaming and smart-card technology, the most advanced of its type in the world today. This technology interfaces with the Group's data warehouse, which holds key information on customer preferences, and provides a cashless payment and gambling facility across the Group’s casino businesses.

Predictability & Consistency

Sun International has a vision for the future of information technology across the organisation. The business is pursuing a programme of operational excellence, which embraces predictability, consistency and continuity in the delivery of its services to clients and stakeholders and the introduction of cutting-edge technologies, capable of offering its resorts and casinos a competitive advantage and an improved customer experience.

Peter Bacon, Managing Director of Sun International, describes his company’s business philosophy as, “Placing a primary focus on the customer.” “In a service industry,” he says, “we have to ensure that wherever possible we exceed our customer expectations and this involves
ensuring we give our employees the right tools, training and resources to carry out their roles efficiently. Information technology plays an important role in achieving this goal”.

What Sun International was looking for, according to John Lee, Director E-Commerce and Technology, was a computing environment that is both stable and more importantly, provides the maximum opportunity for systems availability in its online gaming environment,
reservations and management systems.

Like many large businesses, Sun International was looking for greater ‘end-to-end predictability’ and finer control of its IT environment in conjunction with a search for a lower total cost of ownership.

Sun International obtained proposals and interviewed a number of different companies to determine whether any of these could deliver the comprehensive service solution the company required. Finally, Chief Executive, Peter Bacon, concluded that only Unisys, with its world-class
reputation and international ISO 9001:2000 best practice certification for managed services, could demonstrate the necessary experience and infrastructure that the company needed.

Unisys has the experience of delivering a service desk solution to more than twenty of Sun International’s business units distributed throughout southern Africa. Its strategic relationship with Sun International has existed since the consulting and implementation phase of the company’s Year 2000 project. “We asked Unisys,” says Lee, “to give us an end-to-end technology service. Unisys would provide and run the service desk for us, a first resolution support service and we, in turn, would provide the delivery mechanism for both second and third level resolution, with our own subject matter experts, as well as individual companies throughout southern Africa, which include Unisys and who can provide this facility on an outsourced basis”.

The end-to-end solution the Unisys service desk was asked to offer, included comprehensive incident monitoring and a configuration and management service to a tightly defined service level agreement (SLA). This would embrace multiple server Operating Systems, multiple
applications, 1,200 network devices, 3,200 desktops and 15,800 separate configuration items. “Multiple everything,” says John Lee and in addition, Unisys was asked to provide detailed daily, weekly and monthly management reports, perform a customer satisfaction survey
on a monthly basis and take responsibility for change management, local and wide-area network management and deliver network design engineers and technology consultants for project review on a regular basis.

Continuous Service Improvement

“Prior to broadening our relationship with Unisys, Sun International had,” says John Lee, “an environment with technology costs we were unsure of.” “In addition,” he remarks, “we had periods of instability as well as inconsistency. What has happened since we partnered with
Unisys is that this has all changed, in that we now have a single point of contact for all technology-related matters and we have moved into a more proactive way of deploying and supporting technology. We are more predictable, we are far more consistent than we have been in the past and our systems, most particularly in our gaming and hospitality environments, are at a much higher level of availability than we have seen previously”.

Wendy Kaufer is the IT Manager at Grand West Casino and Entertainment World. In her job, she sees the combination of business continuity and availability as a mission-critical function in one of the world’s most technologically advanced casinos.

“Unisys,” says Kaufer, “has helped us with business continuity and it has helped us manage our systems better, setting thresholds and knowing in advance where problems might occur. The other tangible benefit lies with keeping tabs on all of the calls that come through to the service desk and ensuring that each call is logged and resolved, so we don’t drop any balls”.

Kurt Peter, General Manager of Grand West Casino and Entertainment World, is also delighted by the overall improvement in reliability that the partnership with Unisys has introduced. “As a large entertainment facility, with as many as three thousand employees, night clubs, restaurants, family entertainment areas and a casino, IT is a mission critical function. We rely on IT and because we are a smartcard casino we rely on IT through our customer’s playing cycle, to the point of redeeming cash. So it’s mission critical to us in that a casino cannot operate without the IT environment, which in turn must be available on a 24/7 basis. Without this reliability, we are stumped”.

Before embarking on the Unisys service desk project, change control in a multiple systems environment was a challenge for Sun International.Wendy Kaufer remarks, “Historically, this has always been a problem. Technicians like to experiment with systems and having Unisys assume this task ensures that we have controlled and documented changes, with the necessary resources properly managed. This also assists us with up-time, so we know what has changed, when it’s changed and if anything goes wrong, what we need to do to reverse
the problem”.

A Valued Business Partner

In addition to the infrastructure managed service offered by Unisys, as part of a wider strategic partnership, Unisys is also assisting Sun International with vendor management involving other companies, such as Dell. Wendy Kaufer sees this as an important value-added service. “It assists us in managing the time that it takes to resolve problems with other vendors, using the single Unisys service desk and ensuring that the service level agreements we have with other vendors are kept to”.

Of similar importance to Kaufer at the Grand West is asset management. “Unisys have been particularly helpful”, she says, “in helping us with our asset database and register and putting the result into the service desk to manage.We can now see which pieces of our
hardware real-estate might give us problems and we rely on the service desk for that information”.

Examining the tangible benefits of the partnership from his position as Chief Executive, Peter Bacon, comments, “We introduced Unisys to ensure that we had the appropriate structure in place to manage all the components of our business strategy across the Group. The managed service has gone a long way towards giving us an understanding of what our problems are and how to deal with these efficiently, timelessly and in a way that has been able to demonstrate quite substantial reductions in cost”.

Achieving Results Together

Sun International continues to expand its successful business in new directions as it seeks to offer much broader value to its customers, through linking together many of the key tourist destinations in southern Africa in a single holistic experience. The internal provision of reliable and cost-effective information technology is viewed as a fundamental part of the Group’s strategy and it is recognized that Unisys, as a strategic technology partner, will make a vital contribution in the management and delivery of the computing environment that Sun International will build tomorrow’s services upon.

The cultural integration between the two companies has played an important part in the overall success of the managed service project. Flexibility and a willingness to understand Sun International’s business drivers were regarded as a strong factor in Unisys ability to deliver the
comprehensive service that Sun International required from it.

“Unisys”, says Peter Bacon, “has become part of our organization and has endeavoured to ensure that there is real understanding of the issues that we are trying to achieve. I would consider the relationship as offering an extension of our own organization and from
that standpoint it’s a marriage and I hope a lasting one”.

Final thoughts on the value of a truly successful technology partnership is expressed by John Lee. “The two goals for Sun International are business continuity and great customer service. Unisys has helped us achieve this”.

Solution Overview

Infrastructure Managed Services

Business Situation

Sun international required a single, cost-effective managed service across the Group’s computing environment, offering flexibility and absolute reliability for the mission critical environment.

Solution

An advanced, infrastructure managed service from Unisys delivering single point of contactfor service delivery, greater predictability, business continuity and lower total cost of ownership.

Services

• Single point of contact service desk
• Application monitoring
• Asset management
• Change management
• Configuration management
• Desk side support services
• Incident management
• Remote hardware and software monitoring and management
• LAN monitoring & management
• WAN monitoring & management
• Project, Programme and Management reporting

Benefits

• Greater cost predictability across the computing environment
• Improved change management & asset tracking
• Greater customer satisfaction
• Hardware & software standardisation
• A more stable computing infrastructure
• Improved management reporting

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