From...

April 19, 1999
Web posted at: 3:13 p.m. EDT (1913 GMT)

by Juan Carlos Perez

(IDG) -- Lockheed Martin Corp. decided in early 1996 that it had to give its by-then almost 100,000 e-mail users a reliable and efficient messaging platform. At the time, the company, which has gone through 17 mergers, had 25 different e-mail systems, about 900 messaging servers and no central e-mail management hub.

"Lockheed Martin ... (had) this humongous, disorganized conglomeration of systems out there," said Ed Mehalick, director of engineering and infrastructure systems at the Enterprise Information Systems department of Lockheed Martin.

Not surprisingly, the interoperation of the systems was bumpy. Messages took a long time to reach their recipients. Sometimes they never got there; messages got lost so frequently that some users preferred to communicate via fax. Meanwhile, the information technology department spent much time putting out fires ignited by e-mail malfunctions. Doing basic management operations, such as synchronizing the directories, was a nightmare.

"We were spending a lot of time trying to 'Band-Aid' the system," he said during a presentation at Compaq Computer Corp.'s Innovate Forum '99 held this week here.

The old architecture was designed in a way that a message in the same building could travel thousands of miles before coming back.

"In our old configuration, a message being sent from one user in one office to another user just two doors down could have gone to three different cities across the country," hopping from mail system to mail system, Mehalick said.

The clunky and unreliable e-mail operation served a company with more than $25 billion in annual revenue, and officials decided it needed to be revamped. The task, however, was daunting. The users were scattered among 700 locations in the U.S. and in more than 50 other countries. The migration had to be done very carefully to avoid disrupting service.

As if the technical and logistical parts weren't challenging enough, the IT people in charge of the project had to temporarily become salespeople to sell the project to the company's top managers. The reason: The money for the project would come out of the coffers of the different business units.

To help achieve companywide consensus, the IT department created a group made up of employees from every business unit to establish the e-mail system's requirements. The idea was to make sure that no sector of the company felt left out of the project's planning process and that the needs of the entire company would be addressed. That is particularly important in a company as big and with so many different corporate cultures as Lockheed, Mehalick said.

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"That really was a significant factor" in getting the project rolling, he said.

The group determined that the system had to be easy to use, fast, reliable, easy to administer, centrally manageable and scalable.

Next, the company put out a request for proposals to give a variety of vendors an opportunity to show Lockheed what they had to offer. "We were looking for a single supplier that would be able to provide the hardware, software and services required," Mehalick said.

It was a long, six-month process. The company formed an evaluation team made up of 150 representatives from every sector of the company to, once again, make sure that each had a say about the selection of the provider.

Ultimately, Lockheed went with Compaq's proposal to install Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange 5.0 on Alpha servers running on Windows NT.

Before migrating each location to the new system, the IT department would hold an open house at the site to give users a preview of the new system and let them try it out, he said. Management briefings were also organized.

"Again, this is a simple aspect that I think sometimes gets overlooked, but it's so important to make sure that the users are buying in to what you're trying to do," he said

The IT department also scripted detailed instructions for how the system was to be rolled out at each site to ensure a uniform and efficient implementation across the board. The result was that the project was completed on schedule in July 1998 and under budget.

"The intent was that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel in every location. We wanted to do exactly the same thing [everywhere] and do it once and reduce the cost of the implementation," he said.

The generic implementation plan was modified for each location to address the specifics of each site. With the methodology set down, six teams were created to go out and implement the system across the company.

"Planning and communications are two key success factors," he said.

For the implementation, the IT department and the Compaq team faced another challenge: implementing the system in phases over the course of 12 months without disrupting the service of the legacy systems. As luck would have it, the only major service disruption during the migration occurred at the company headquarters in Bethesda, Md.

"You wouldn't believe the instant visibility that we got. It's one of those things you don't want to go through," Mehalick said. The problem was quickly fixed.

Once over that bump, the implementation was completed without major problems.

Thus, Lockheed went from having 25 different mail systems to having one system with only one directory. The number of messaging servers dropped from 900 to 135, which eased the administration and simplified the architecture.

"Our system is performing very well and well beyond our expectations," Mehalick said.

Delivery times have gone from an average of three hours -- and from highs of several days -- to an average of three minutes, mainly because the new system, unlike the old one, was set up so that messages only travel as far as they need to in order to reach their recipients.

At the same time, the user base has increased to about 110,000 users, and the number of messages has doubled from 15 million per month to more than 30 million per month. The new system also has centralized administration, making it easier for the IT department to manage and monitor.

"People started using the messaging system. You see people now depending on it," Mehalick said. The system is reliable, and the problem of having messages float into cyberspace and never reaching their intended recipients has been solved, according to Mehalick. "You can't put a price tag on end users being happy," he said.