Maritz boosts business performance for Fortune 100 and 500 companies with Veeam

The business challenge

Maritz has been serving customers for more than 125 years. Reinvention is in the company’s DNA.

Maritz began as a wholesaler and manufacturer of fine jewelry before pioneering the incentives industry, revolutionizing meeting planning and transforming customer experiences. Maritz serves more than half of the Fortune 100 companies, such as General Motors, and numerous Fortune 500 companies, such as Southwest Airlines.

Maritz’s practices are firmly rooted in science. The company combines behavioral science with data insights and analytics to provide a variety of digital services and software solutions that help clients increase sales, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

“Our challenge was protecting these services and software solutions, and the data they generate,” said Michael Masters, infrastructure specialist at Maritz. “Legacy backup (Dell EMC Networker) was beginning to stun virtual machines (VMs) during backup, causing some services and solutions to become temporarily unavailable. Recovery was slow, sometimes taking hours. If our services and solutions aren’t backed up and available to our clients, we’re failing them.”

General Motors has been a client for years. One of the solutions Maritz developed for the automotive giant identifies customer behaviors that optimize profitability, helping to sell more vehicles, parts and services. General Motors responds to customers’ questions and requests in real time, which not only improves the customer experience but also increases the company’s Customer Satisfaction Index score (a rating system in the automotive industry).

“The data in General Motor’s solution is stored on Microsoft SQL Server, which was susceptible to stunning during backup,” Masters said. “A few other servers were at risk too, including the one hosting a customer loyalty website for Southwest Airlines that rewards frequent flyers with travel and merchandise. Our job is to protect clients’ solutions and their data, but legacy backup wasn’t getting the job done.”

Maritz considered two replacements for legacy backup: Cohesity and Veeam Availability Suite.

“We picked the leader in the data protection industry,” Masters said.

The Veeam solution

Maritz replaced legacy backup with Veeam to protect the digital services and software solutions that help clients boost business growth. Veeam eliminates stun during backup and decreases recovery time from hours to minutes. Veeam also supports regulatory compliance with state-specific data privacy laws and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

“Maritz is a catalyst for solving today’s business challenges, and Veeam supports us as we help companies increase their sales, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee engagement,” Masters said.

Veeam helps Maritz in several ways, beginning with data protection that eliminates stun. Veeam backs up several PB across more than 1,000 VMware vSphere VMs from INFINIDAT storage snapshots. Veeam integration with INFINIDAT lets Maritz back up as often as needed with zero impact on servers that support clients’ services and solutions. Veeam also reduces recovery time from hours to minutes. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server recovers databases in just a few clicks, including the databases helping General Motors identify customer behaviors that optimize profitability. Instant VM Recovery restores a VM from a backup in just a few clicks, including the one hosting a website for Southwest Airlines that rewards frequent flyers with points toward travel and merchandise.

Veeam also supports regulatory compliance for Maritz. General Motors’ SQL databases containing customer information and feedback are protected by state-specific data privacy laws. Credit card purchases made on Southwest Airlines’ rewards website are protected by PCI DSS.

“Veeam’s built-in encryption helps us protect data before backup, in transit and at rest,” Masters said. “And Veeam’s detailed reports help us demonstrate compliance.”

Next Maritz will leverage Veeam Cloud Data Management. Veeam Backup for AWS will enable the company to make backups of Amazon EC2 data and keep them in Amazon S3 for highly available, cost-effective, long-term storage.

“Veeam will protect our critical data by creating and maintaining a chain of cloud-native snapshots of EC2 instances in case we need to recover from them in a disaster situation,” Masters said. “We were familiar with Veeam Cloud Data Management when we replaced legacy backup, and now we understand even more why Veeam is the industry leader in data protection.”

The results

• Protects the services and solutions helping clients increase productivity and growth
  Maritz helps clients drive performance by designing solutions based on behavioral science and their individual business requirements. Veeam protects these solutions so clients can increase customer loyalty, employee experience and sales.
• Eliminates stun during backup and decreases recovery time from hours to minutes
  Veeam integration with INFINIDAT storage snapshots eliminates stun on critical VMs during backup. High-speed recovery features reduce recovery time, so clients always have access to solutions and data.
• Supports regulatory compliance with state-specific data privacy laws and PCI DSS
  Veeam helps secure data with built-in, end-to-end AES 256-bit encryption that transforms it into an unreadable, scrambled format with the help of a cryptographic algorithm and a secret key. Veeam also provides complete visibility into the backup infrastructure and detailed reports, helping Maritz ensure compliance.