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Industry Focus

Engineering firm that designs, investigates, and rehabilitates structures and building enclosures

Size

400+ employees in five offices, including Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C.  

Networking Solution

Cloud computing services provided by AT&T

Business Value

Cost-effective and rapid response to client needs and business opportunities

About Our Customer

Established in 1956, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc. (SGH) is a national engineering firm that designs, investigates, and rehabilitates structures and building enclosures. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, SGH manages projects throughout the U.S. and in more than 30 other countries. Named a "Best Firm to Work For" by Structural Engineer and CE News magazines for five consecutive years, SGH has also received more than 300 awards and recognitions for its engineering excellence.

Situation

While SGH works on thousands of projects every year, a select number of them require significantly more computing power to meet peak demands. SGH needed a single, flexible IT solution to meet these demands. 

Solution

AT&T cloud services enable SGH to scale computing capacity quickly to support its engineers’ efforts when meeting tight deadlines. When the project is over, capacity can be scaled back easily and cost effectively. Computing resources move from a capital expense to an operating expense and can be closely aligned with the dynamic needs of the business.

Seismic Computing Demands

SGH’s work portfolio includes new building design, water pipeline investigation and parking garage rehabilitation. In addition, SGH’s team analyzes seismic risk to power plants and why building systems fail.

The mix of different projects on the firm’s roster means the amount of computing power needed for calculations varies greatly, from as little as five to as many as 100 servers for each job. The calculation time required could last from one week to several. This is especially true when it comes to seismic analysis, which includes evaluating what occurs between a structure and the supporting soil around it during an earthquake. Those projects frequently demand many more servers to condense computing time.

SGH takes on many of these seismic modeling projects, which requires analyzing massive quantities of data – what the IT industry now calls “big-data” analytics. Often the goal is to assemble more detailed analytic models and several parametric studies to increase the accuracy of results.

Consequently, that means longer processing times. Putting work on hold to build up the internal IT infrastructure isn’t an option.  But, in this time-sensitive scenario, the cloud is.

“When we take on a project with a lot of computational analysis, it’s a challenge to come up with all the hardware we need in house, especially when our engineers only have a short amount time to come up with results,” said Michael Kushakji, Director of IT at SGH. “Since our business is very dynamic, every single project we take on is different so it’s difficult to have a single IT solution that fits them all. Cloud computing with AT&T lets us ramp up quickly with a lot less man hours and capital outlay and a lot more flexibility.”

100 Servers, One Day

SGH first tapped into the AT&T cloud while helping a client evaluate the potential seismic impact on new facilities being considered. SGH’s client provided little more than a month to complete the complex analytical task and provide its engineering assessment, a key component to gain approval for planned construction.

Kushakji worked with Frank Kan, a principal in the firm, to calculate the number of servers needed to process large data files within the small timeframe. The SASSI (System for the Analysis of Soil-Structure Interaction) modeling program would be churning through about 100 files, each as large as 40 GB. Just one file could tie up one server for an entire day. In total, Kan and Kushakji determined they could need as many as 100 servers to meet the deadline.

“We needed to power up a large number of computers very fast,” Kushakji said. “I wasn’t even sure we could get that kind of capital hardware from our vendor that quickly.”

Instead, SGH turned to the cloud: AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service. ^SM The firm had the computing capacity it needed within just 24 hours. “Our local AT&T team deserves a lot of kudos,” Kushakji continues. “They stuck with us late into the night on a holiday weekend to make sure we had the capacity we needed to get the job done.”

Cloud storage resources provided the rapid storage and retrieval required for I/O-intensive modeling applications to reduce performance bottlenecks and produce finer, more accurate spatial representations.

SGH concluded the project within a matter of a few weeks. Kan said this rapid response reflects what clients expect. “With the economy these days, fast turnaround is becoming more important. Clients want us to do more in less time. Without the cloud, we wouldn’t have been able to complete this analysis so quickly for the client. We would have told them it would take at least three months.” Today, SGH continues to conduct that client’s analytical studies. “They know we deliver results as promised and on schedule. That’s one of the reasons they keep coming back to us,” said Kan.

Dynamic Scaling Up or Down

With cloud services, it’s no longer necessary to wait through procurement cycles that eat into precious days or weeks on a rush job. Further, there’s no need to squeeze more expensive resources into the data center where they would have to be managed or, worse, left sitting idle when a project is over and wasting capital resources.

“With the pay-as-you-go cloud model, we pay only for the capacity we use. We turn the cloud services on when we need them and off when we don’t,” Kushakji said. “We’re also much more nimble when it comes to getting new work underway. It’s really saved us on a couple of projects.”

Kan said he doesn’t even have to be in the office to quickly dial up or down computing power. “It’s amazing to me. When I’m traveling or on vacation, I use an interface on my BlackBerry® to quickly access the cloud and set up servers.”

This flexibility was key to SGH’s choice of AT&T. “I contacted a half dozen companies about cloud services, including other telecommunications companies. I couldn't find any that could compete with the AT&T cloud offerings,” said Kushakji. “A lot of the others said they could host our applications as long as we signed an annual agreement. We were looking for something much more dynamic.”

Kushakji also appreciates the openness of the AT&T cloud, another differentiator in his search for a cloud provider. “We can run a wide range of operating systems which support virtually any application,” he continues. “AT&T is ahead of the curve, they’re really committed to enterprise-level cloud services.”

Connecting and Mobilizing a Global Workforce

The same AT&T MPLS-enabled network that connects SGH to the cloud also connects SGH employees around the world for hi-def video conferencing and large file transfers between offices. With the wide range of projects SGH manages, that “office” can be nearly anywhere. For example, an engineer standing on scaffolding atop a skyscraper in New York can input data into an AT&T 3G-enabled tablet PC, then shoot it back to the home office where workers use it to get a jump on a time-sensitive project.

SGH’s transition to Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) trunking will converge voice and data on the same MPLS network. The goal is to decrease costs and management complexity and increase redundancy for voice services. SGH also uses AT&T disaster recovery services to back up its own private cloud.

Kushakji anticipates the firm will continue to take advantage of the AT&T cloud. “Ultimately, I’d like to move all our computing activities into the cloud to limit our CapEx purchases and build up our off-site redundancy,” he said. Other opportunities include scaling performance to the supercomputer level for cutting-edge modeling and simulation capabilities – delivered via the sheer processing power of the AT&T cloud.

“We partner with AT&T in a lot of key areas,” Kushakji said. “Our account team and customer service reps are unbelievable and the resources they can pull into a project are amazing. They make a huge difference in our business. So it was nice to be able to extend cloud computing as another AT&T service without recreating the wheel.”

Voice of the Customer

“Cloud computing with AT&T lets us ramp up quickly with a lot less man hours and capital outlay and a lot more flexibility.”

- Michael Kushakji, Director of IT, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc.