KEMET
Transcript of video:
When we start talking about what Open Systems is partnering with and helping Kemet to achieve, we really need to take a step back and look at Kemet’s strategy as a whole for network transformation, and that’s one of cloud-first. We need to be able to ensure latency and ensure performance to our new cloud-based applications. Open Systems helps us achieve that by giving us visibility into our network traffic and the ability to control quality of service from our sites into the various clouds globally around the world.
Kemet has around 15,000 employees. On any given day, the Kemet network consists of 23 manufacturing locations and 33 sales offices. On an annual basis, we’re adding capacity or adding a new manufacturing location or joint venture at least once or twice a year, and sales offices also move once or twice a year, so we have to be pretty agile in how quickly we can respond and bring up a new network.
The best part of working with Open Systems is the responsiveness, both from a program management perspective and also from just a pure logistics perspective. The ability of Open Systems to get devices into countries we need them in has been excellent. It allows us to move much more rapidly than traditional infrastructure projects have been able to move. Its responsibility is to align itself with the business; we should only be working on projects that the business needs us working on. So, it’s very important that we understand the business’s trajectory and what they find is important, what’s going to drive their success. It’s our job to be a little bit ahead of them, to be one step ahead of them so we can provide the technology and the tools they need to be successful.
Open Systems gives us both depth from an expertise perspective as well as breadth from a time zone coverage perspective. We are a 24×7 company; we always have manufacturing going on, so Open Systems gives us that ability to cover our network traffic and monitoring 24 hours, seven days a week.
One of the benefits of Open Systems was the cost capabilities that they enabled us to realize. Open Systems allowed us to avoid a lot of upfront capital investment, which saved us a lot of cash out of pocket. But long term, it also saves us and helps us realize a lot of the operational expense cost savings that SD-WAN, in general, promises but a lot of companies aren’t able to realize.
Network security starts on day one as we architect our WAN and LAN solutions. We spend a lot of time talking about perimeter defense and how we build in security. Open Systems sometimes proactively monitors our environment, so a lot of times they will tell us, “Hey, we fixed this; we didn’t even know there was a problem.” Open Systems is already helping us realize some of our future goals for our network transformation as we continue to move applications to the cloud.
Performance of the WAN as a whole is very important. Ensuring low latency to those applications is more important than ever before because it’s outside of our traditional firewall. Open Systems enables us to expand our perimeter and bring those cloud applications inside of our wide area network and still enable the same level of low latency and high-performance traffic that we’ve seen traditionally with on-prem solutions.
It is a fascinating area of work because of how fast it’s changing. In the last 20 years, it’s changed dramatically, and it seems to only be speeding up more and more. Whether we’re talking about the infrastructure side of IT and LAN management where Open Systems helps us, or IoT, blockchain, and Industry 4.0, they’re all big topics for our manufacturing company like Kemet. The speed with which those things change and the benefit that those technologies can bring to a business are really exciting. It’s fun to be part of it and be part of something that is going to really change how business is done in the future.
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