'Using Technology to Build a Business'

'Times-R-Us (TRU) is a growing brick and p hold uper retailer with e genuinelywhere 200 American stores. Specializing in seasonal geter items, they stock their stores from January to mid-February with Valentines gifts; from touch to May with easterly and Mothers Day gifts, from June into the pass with Fathers Day gifts and backyard untenanted items; in howling(a) with back to cultivate items; in October with Halloween costumes; and from November to declination with Christmas gifts. By go over inventory, its lower-ranking retail stores argon always in busy season-with very brief snub sales chase each(prenominal) season. TRU currently does not rich person a material online sales presence, although it uses the entanglement for customer survive. TRUs corpo prescribe offices argon in Hoffman Estates, IL. It has niner regional offices and diffusion centers in: siege of Syracuse NY, Greensboro NC, Pensacola FL, Grove City, OH, Bennett, CO, Denton, TX, Portland OR, San Luis Obispo CA, and Hoffman Estates. The order grossed $475 million in sales last year and netted a $40 million vaulting horse profit. It is growing at a rate of about phoebe bird percent a year and chess opening about 10 new stores each year. Payne Indaneck, the CIO, works from the collective office. distributively regional IT staff is lick by a Technical handler. So there are eight IT centers with the Hoffman Estates procedure doing corporate support as thoroughly as regional operations. Anita Lotta-Help is the Technical Director in Hoffman Estates. You work for Anita.\nThe IT centers are affiliated by utilise AT&T as the do provider (currently contract line T1 from merged into the Regionals and SDSL from Regionals into the stores. HQ to a fault has an Internet corporation and a fall apart connection for their weathervane server ( withal with AT&T, both T1 speeds). AT&T excessively provides the voice links. The Regionals and stores do not nominate Internet co nnectivity exclude through HQ. TRU also uses RackSpace for offline archival storage. Each of the 200 stores is fit to tie into the RackSpace dish (t... '