The challenge

With a long history as one of the largest U.S. educational publishers, the company was preparing to split from its parent company and focus on its core, revenue-generating products. The company partnered with Atos to support the move with IT management consulting, data center and IT services transition, workplace services, and ongoing operational improvements.

Along with the organizational challenges, the company was facing external upheaval in educational publishing. Its industry was being fundamentally altered by new digital products and delivery methods. Print revenues, meanwhile, were declining. To stay viable, the company needed the agility and cost-flexibility to meet user expectations for personalized learning tools, affordably priced student materials and anytime availability of online products and services.

The solution

To support its leaner organization and its focus on core, industry-specific functions, the company adopted an “asset light” model, transferring its data center and assets to Atos.

Atos has become the firm’s largest IT partner, providing:

• Service desk
• Workplace services/device management
• Data center operations
• Mainframe as a service
• Servers/middleware/storage
• Service management

Business benefit

The modernization and infrastructure consolidation efforts have helped reduce IT costs, increase reliability and sharpen business focus:

• Server and data center costs decreased by 25%
• Outages are at a record low
• Atos has never missed a service level agreement (SLA)
• Employees consistently give the service desk 9+ satisfaction ratings.

Meanwhile, the company has been able to focus on its business transformation. Sales of digital units in the higher education market overtook print for the first time in 2016 and have continued to grow.