What is The Carphone Warehouse (CPW)?

David Byrne: The Carphone Warehouse is the world's largest independent mobile phone retailer, as well as one of the UK's leading telephone and Internet service providers. The Carphone Warehouse has more than 2,450 stores in nine EU countries and 1,000 Best Buy Mobile locations in the U.S. What was the problem CPW faced? How was CPW handling the problem when you went searching for a better solution? Knowing what's "under the hood" of our IT organization has been a particular challenge for us, especially with our growth and acquisition of AOL UK in the Telco space. We needed to gain greater control and cost savings within IT and "ERP for IT" seemed to be a good solution to increase our efficiency. Specifically, post-acquisition, we had no measure of our more than 1,400-server estate and interdependencies, we had no reliable, centralized database to support ITIL initiatives, and our CMDB integrations were slow, therefore expensive. Additionally, our Best Buy joint venture required ...  more