UPDATED 10:03 EDT / DECEMBER 23 2013

Santa Claus moves to the cloud with HP

After a 2011 near disaster when a reindeer ate his list of who was naughty and who was nice, and feeling completely burned out in 2012, Santa Claus made an early resolution for 2013 to modernize his operations and chose HP as his partner, the company announced recently.

“Santa called us in in November 2012,” says Robert Russo, proof of concept manager and business development manager for HP Enterprise Cloud Services. “After a four week cloud assessment workshop, we were able to show him how we could nearly double the productivity of his operations while protecting his data, and in particular his valuable master list of who’s been good and who’s been bad and cutting his cost of operations more than 35%.”

Based on these figures, Santa gave the go ahead and HP’s elves set to work. By August they were 98% complete. The result, Russo said, was a huge saving in time and money and most important an increase in overall efficiency that allows the elves to work shorter hours and spend more time with their families.

One of the specific areas that HP transformed was data security. Santa’s systems suffer 5,000 attempted penetration attacks daily from naughty children trying to get their names on the nice list. Today that list is secure, which means that Santa no longer has to recheck it, saving 2,500 hours of work over the year.

Like many companies, Santa Enterprises has a peak season issue. For most of the year it can run on 50 servers, but in the four months from September through December it needs much greater compute power. HP moved Santa’s system to a private cloud that allows him to scale up to 150 servers for the Christmas rush without having to buy any extra hardware. When the rush is over he returns that extra compute power to HP’s cloud pool for use by other companies such as ski resorts that need it at that time. Thus he saves a huge amount of capital costs. Through this and increased automation, HP is saving Santa about 35% of his application hosting and infrastructure costs.

HP’s solution also gave Santa real-time access to his data for the first time. A great deal of the information critical to his operations resided in his brain and those of his senior Elves. Something as simple as a head cold could hold up operations. Now everything is on the system and is backed up around the world, so his vital operational data is safe.

HP also was able to modernize his manufacturing with features like just-in-time inventory control and eliminate a large number of manual processes. The result is that Santa is saving money on major items such as warehousing while keeping his toy manufacturing operating without interruptions. And HP automated the toy wrapping operation, saving considerably more time and expense.

Finally HP was able to analyze Santa’s worldwide route, cutting the time he needs to make his worldwide deliveries from 42 to 21 hours. And using HP’s partnerships with leading voice/data carriers and satellite systems, it can keep Santa connected while he speeds around the world. He has an HP Slate 10 HD tablet in his sleigh to help him navigate and a Slate 7 that he carries down chimneys into children’s homes that he uses to access information about the children in the house, so he knows what toys – or in some cases lumps of coal – to leave for each child.

Overall, HP was able to reduce the total time Santa and the Elves spend working by 48% from 21,800 to 11,280 hours. This automation also allowed Santa to reassign many of his elves to higher level, more rewarding jobs. And it also means that they no longer have to work long hours 12 months a year to get all the toys ready. In fact this January for the first time in centuries, Santa plans to shut down his entire operation for a month and take Mrs. Santa and the elves on a well deserved vacation – at the South Pole.


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