Overview of the Organization

HugeCo is a widely dispersed organization with 225,000 employees and contractors located in 34 countries around the world. Most employees live and work in countries where HugeCo's manufacturing facilities are located: the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Australia. HugeCo has relationships with hundreds of other companies that serve as suppliers, dealers, and customers for the goods it produces.

HugeCo has a strong, well- funded central information services (IS) organization that operates out of the corporate headquarters site in Chicago, Illinois. Four regional IS departments serve the needs of each of the HugeCo sites in North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The primary role of the central IS organization is to design the network and applications architecture, run several central services (such as a corporate e-mail hub), and coordinate the activities of HugeCo's regional IS departments. The regional IS departments are responsible for installing and maintaining all hardware and software within their regions .

The information technology infrastructure at HugeCo includes a modern, high-speed TCP/IP network. Within each site, a combination of 10BaseT and 100BaseT Ethernet systems is used to connect desktop machines and servers. Larger sites also have an internal 1-gigabit fiber backbone network. Most sites are connected with leased T1 (1.54Mbps) or T3 (45Mbps) lines to regional data centers that are connected to each other with leased T3 lines. Some of HugeCo's smallest sites are connected via the public Internet via IPsec-based virtual private network (VPN) technology and local Internet service providers (ISPs). Figure 25.1 shows an overview of the HugeCo network.

Figure 25.1. The HugeCo TCP/IP Network

The central IS organization, along with the regional IS departments, provides a rich, robust set of e-mail, discussion forum, group scheduling, and document publishing services to HugeCo's professional employees. Here are the most important applications in use at HugeCo:

• Sun ONE Messaging Server provides e-mail routing, delivery, and reading services for most of HugeCo's sites. Sendmail.org's sendmail message transfer agent (MTA) and the University of Washington's imapd mail store software are used by some sites, but both packages are being phased out. A variety of desktop e-mail clients are used, including QUALCOMM's Eudora, Netscape Communicator 4.x and 7.x e-mail, and Microsoft's Outlook clients .

• Lotus Notes servers and clients are used to support group discussion forums and certain collaborative applications developed in-house. Notes is used only by HugeCo's executive staff and their assistants. The Notes users also use the Notes client to read their e-mail.

• Netscape Enterprise Server is used to provide document publishing services and to support a variety of custom Web-based applications. Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is the most widely used Web client, but Netscape's Navigator browser is still used by about one-third of HugeCo's employees.

Most applications are hosted on Sun Enterprise servers running the Solaris 8 Unix operating system. The notable exceptions are the servers for Lotus Notes, which are Dell PowerEdge servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.

The central IS organization also employs several dozen software engineers who develop and maintain a variety of custom Web-based applications. These software engineers also assist employees in the regional IS departments and within HugeCo departments that are developing their own applications.

HugeCo benefits from strong leadership that makes it possible for the central IS organization to dictate which software and hardware are used throughout much of the company. Still, there is a high degree of independence within regions, especially with respect to how services and data are administered.