MR. YOUTH
Company Profile:
Mr. Youth was founded as the antidote for traditional media burnout
in the youth market. They’ve grown into a group of 100+ enthusiastic
employees who realize that what the young market is into today evolves
into mass market appeal tomorrow.
Business Challenge:
When the firm started, the lead developer was also the “IT guy”. As Mr. Youth
racked up more and more wins in the new business efforts (including
Starbucks, Microsoft, JetBlue), his ability to keep the machines
humming was overshadowed by the need to turn out excellent sites and
concepts. The challenge was to determine a way to support a growing
company through the hills and valleys of development cycles, new business
pitches and frantic Spring Break festivals.
Technical Challenge:
The Mr. Youth infrastructure was originally built for a 25 person office. When
Valiant engaged with Mr. Youth (in 2005), they were already at 40 users, and
growing fast! The technical challenge was to introduce a scalable architecture
while ensuring zero downtime and still maintaining the desktops, printers,
internet connections and remote users at live events.
Brief:
Valiant has been the full time help desk provider for Mr. Youth since we
began our engagement, keeping over 100 users in a variety of locations
happy, healthy and working smoothly. In addition, we’ve rolled in a heavily
populated Dell rack with an Exchange server, two multi-terabyte file
servers and redundant development & QA servers for the dev team. We’ve also
been closely involved in capacity planning and budget forecasting for Mr. Youth,
both for client jobs as well as Mr. Youth itself.
