ACS, a Dallas, Texas-based Xerox company – and Novell strategic partner – provides a variety of business process, information technology, and systems outsourcing to commercial and government clients worldwide. In other words, they’re the people you call when you need your technology to work.

A major part of ACS’s success is the company’s expertise in providing customers with truly one-off solutions. Whether a company is interested in outsourcing its help desk or its entire IT environment, ACS offers solutions that are custom-tailored to the customer’s exact needs.

As cloud computing emerged, ACS launched a major internal initiative it termed the ACS Management Platform. Or AMP, for short. The goal of AMP was to give customers and business partners visibility into the cloud-based platforms that their services would be hosted on. In practical terms, that meant configuring, provisioning, adding an identity fabric, and managing everything within the cloud.

Because ACS didn’t want to rip and replace, it turned to Novell solutions to complement its existing infrastructure:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is one of the operating platforms made available to ACS customers.
• PlateSpin Orchestrate is the workflow tool for provisioning.
• PlateSpin Migrate moves workloads into the cloud.
• PlateSpin Recon discovers all physical and virtual environments for providing visibility into the outsourced environment.
• Novell Identity Manager and Novell Access Manager are used for provisioning, access management and directory synchronization.
• ZENworks Configuration Management is ACS’ software configuration and delivery tool of choice.
• ZENworks Linux Management is the Linux configuration tool ACS uses.
• Novell Sentinel provides automated security information and event management for true policy enforcement.

With these Novell solutions in place, ACS is able to give its customers the value they’re looking for. Results so far have included increased process efficiencies, improved data accuracy, shorter billing cycles—and lower overall costs.
Just like business needs, clouds are constantly evolving. ACS has found a way to deliver value in clouds of every shape and size.