iVenture Case Study: Operating 24/7 and Worldwide

Case Study: Lightpath Technologies

Light Path Technologies

The Company

For over 25 years, LightPath Technologies has designed, manufactured, and shipped a host of optical and infrared components for major companies in industries such as defense, telecommunications, testing and measurement, and medicine.  In addition to its corporate headquarters and a large manufacturing facility in Orlando, LightPath has production facilities in Shanghai and Zhenjiang, China as well, and has been recognized as an industry leader for its innovative optics and photonics solutions.

“We’ve twice sent them to China to set up firewalls and make sure everything is secure in our two facilities there. Before that, it was kind of loose.”

Dorothy Cipolla
Chief Financial Officer
LightPath Technologies, Inc.

The Challenge

LightPath initially had one in-house IT staffer, and also hired someone in China to manage desktop support there.  Once it was clear LightPath needed more help, they hired a two-person company that, according to LightPath CFO Dorothy Cipolla, “was just too small to manage our needs—there were just too many time zone differences and our needing to be up 24/7.”  It wasn’t working out.

Added to this, LightPath had an aging, in-house infrastructure, a need to comply with complex PCI and ITAR security standards, and software licenses coming due.  “We had people running all sorts of different editions of Microsoft Office,” Cipolla says.  “License renewals were coming up.  We looked at the price of needing to update those, and then having to do it again in three years’ time, and this really helped us to drive the decision to go with iVenture.”

The Solution

iVenture quickly moved LightPath to a hosted server cloud solution supporting both the Orlando and China operations, and ensured they were regulation-compliant.  LightPath also was able to reduce capital expenditures during their plant expansions, thanks to iVenture’s scaling of the hosted services to meet the new usage demands, preventing infrastructure purchases and complex designs.  iVenture eliminated all non-US servers from the network that housed sensitive data and put controls in place to prevent workarounds.

“We’ve twice sent them to China to set up firewalls and make sure everything is secure in our two facilities there,” Cipolla says. “Before that, it was kind of loose.”

The Return

Cipolla sees real financial and logistical benefits for LightPath in its relationship with iVenture.  “You pay for what you need as you need it, and that’s worked out well for us.  We’re not a company that’s big enough to have a CIO and engineers and desktop support and so forth.  We don’t have the resources for it, and we also wouldn’t have enough steady work for them to justify it,” she says.

“Or if you tried to farm out all the projects and functions we needed to four or five different independent contractors, it would get really hard to manage. ” So centralizing those functions in a cost-efficient manner with iVenture has served LightPath well.

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