Aside from handling corporate and back-office support, ABS-CBN's IT team also provides consulting and project management services to other business units, offering cross-functional assistance from planning, to design, all the way to implementation.

Fostering Relationships

Replacing the old multi-core design with a simpler set-up enables Javier's IT team to manage, scale, and troubleshoot the network easier. The new design uses a 720G core infrastructure (with VSS feature), 10G uplinks on critical high bandwidth, layer 3 switching to the edge, and some firewall modules for internal application isolation. And although it sounds complicated, Javier notes that managing the network is actually easy. "During upgrade, we only turned on the features needed to meet our requirements. We only activate additional features after a thorough study of its potential impact and careful planning of its implementation. This way, we are able to manage downtime and lessen the impact on the users," she explains.

During MAMS' pre-implementation stage, Javier's team had to consolidate all the inputs coming from the different business units, the vendors, and even ABS-CBN's subsidiaries, validating their suggestions and ideas, together with its own requirements before adopting and incorporating them into the final design.

"It took us months (to get the design done) because even during the deployment stage, we were still making changes in the design and the way to implement it," Javier recalls. "Our initial target (for implementation) was to everything during Holy Week, since that was the only window we saw when we could do a two-day shutdown of all the operations. Then, we found out that we could not do so because ANC and the News (department) would continue to air their programs even during Holy Week so we had to adjust. To reduce risk of failure, we decided to stagger the implementation over a period of two weeks." The network team also had to provide a separate network to allow ANC and News to stay connected until the new core was in place, then had them switched over to the new core within the very small window given to them .