La Mesa RV Moves to Modernize in the Azure Cloud

La Mesa RV was challenged to update the IT systems used to run its business. La Mesa’s strategy and infrastructure had become outdated. Single points of failure were an emerging threat. Rather than replace physical systems, the company planned a move to the cloud. La Mesa wanted substantial improvements in flexibility, security, and High Availability. It also wanted to focus on business outcomes and simultaneously reduce costs.

La Mesa RV turned to SoftwareONE as a trusted advisor to begin the discovery and analysis of existing resources. SoftwareONE recommendations for Azure cloud migration presented a simplified and streamlined project that reduced client expense, including savings of $12,000 every quarter for Azure network connections. The result is an advanced, cloud-based capability that assures accelerated, secure, and highly available business operations.

La Mesa RV is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates several recreational vehicle (RV) dealerships in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida. As a large multi-location RV dealership, La Mesa sells high-quality motorhomes and they are recognized as a leader in the recreational vehicle industry. The company tag line is “Experience Life.”

The La Mesa RV business is focused on creating happy customers who are serviced in multiple locations spread across four states. However, aging IT systems could no longer adequately support and sustain business growth. A single headquarters data center supported all business locations. Concerns had increased that the outdated infrastructure was an emerging threat to business success. Single points of failure, insufficient security, and, most importantly, no trustworthy Disaster Recovery (DR) mechanism made the business vulnerable.

La Mesa needed a new IT plan. A totally new strategy was critical to support uninterrupted customer service and continued business growth.

La Mesa RV selected SoftwareONE as its cloud consulting partner to help determine how best to address both technical and business requirements, including speed, security, flexibility, reliability, and recoverability.

Following discovery of all existing IT resources, SoftwareONE created recommendations and a plan that would migrate and optimize La Mesa RV IT operations in a new Azure cloud environment.

SoftwareONE recommendations substantially reduced the original price estimates. The plan eliminated several server moves and combined others to simplify the project. A VPN connection was added, and the Azure ExpressRoute connection modified to save $12,000/month.

“When we look at the results, it was clearly worth paying for SoftwareONE expertise. Our outcome is an advanced, cloud-based capability that assures us flexible and highly available IT operations that reliably support our business.”

Geoff Pollock, Information Systems Manager

• Business operations accelerated, secure, and up-to-date: the Azure cloud move protects data and business processes while improving communications among remote sites with fast, reliable connections
• No service interruptions: Critical services moved seamlessly with no outages or user impacts, and business as usual
• Quarterly expenses reduced: Dedicated Microsoft network connection costs reduced by 70%
• High Availability established: Continuous business operation is protected with cloud migration and an added VPN connection to eliminate single points of failure
• Architectural flaws corrected: The new IT strategy reduces reliance on data center hardware. It eliminates design faults and delivers against the objectives of scalability, security, flexibility, and High Availability.