Fairfax Media New Zealand's ICT systems support the production of about 12,000 stories a week, amounting to around 630,000 a year, as well over four million archived stories and more than two million archived pictures.

This content is the company's most valuable asset.

However, with a network of national and regional newspapers and magazines, this precious data was dispersed across the country posing a great risk for the business.

In addition, with systems and resources scattered across the length and breadth of New Zealand, Fairfax's ICT environment was complex, stifling its aims to become a more agile media organisation.

To achieve a simpler, more flexible and secure environment, Fairfax embarked on a major project to consolidate its systems and ICT infrastructure.

Fairfax worked through Gen-i's Planning for Strategic Investment (PSI) process to ensure its technology transformation aligned with its business strategy.

This culminated in the development of a single data centre model, with the hosting of company's core systems and data outsourced to Gen-i.

The company's information and systems are now housed in Gen-i's Airedale Street data centre in Auckland, while Fairfax maintains a back-up data centre in Wellington.

The project enabled Fairfax to rationalise the number of disparate systems it was supporting across the country.
Overall, it reduced the number of physical servers by 45%, total applications by 55%, and the number of supported desktop models by 60% across more than 2000 desktops using Citrix thin client technology.

The company also deployed a digital asset management application to securely manage its content.

The flexibility and resilience of the centralised hosted environment also played a crucial part in Fairfax's business continuity plan following the devastating Canterbury earthquakes.

As a result, Fairfax was able to provide an uninterrupted source of news and information for a community in crisis.