Representative Projects

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MD Financial Management Inc. (CMA companies)
MDFMI engages a third party data centre co-location provider for the provisioning of data centre facilities in support of the Integrated Brokerage System (IBS) environment and supporting applications.
 
This key Technology & Operations functional priority has the objectives of: (a) providing Canadian Physicians with a thoughtful, trustworthy online experience with an ‘Present & Ready for Use’ capability; (b) continue to supporting the CMA & its membership membership with uncompromised security & data integrity to our online portfolio; and (c) transform the IBS environment into an HA configuration with a 99.999% SLA.  This will provide MDFMI clients, financial advisors and employees to use ‘online’, and core-mission critical applications at anytime, including trading, inquiry, account processing and statement/confirm/tax slips inquiry and processing.
 
ORION Cybernetics while providing counsel and direction to the MDFMI’s executive leadership team, also provisions resident program executive and client advocacy for a multi-disciplinary core advisory team.  ORION's counsel and stewardship directs organizational needs within and across the ‘vision-eering’, strategy development, assessment, discovery, and prepositioning the design, engineering and execution phases of this high availability (HA); active resiliency initiative.

MD Physician Services Inc. (CMA companies)
MDPSI engages a third party data centre co-location provider for the provisioning of facilities, hosting, network access, hosting services, and storage (collectively, "data centre facilities") in support of the Integrated Brokerage System (IBS) environment and application support.  MDPSI has been advised that the colocation data centre is being decommissioned and that MDPS’ infrastructures and services need to migrate to a new data centre facility. 

ORION Cybernetics provides MDPSI with requisite professional services and stewardship to the Technology Operations project management team. In guiding MDPSI's multi-disciplinary IT team, ORION provides Client Advocacy support and penetrates within the co-location provider’s relocation-build-deployment team, to ensure the needs of MDPSI are communicated, represented and delivered. 

Shared Services Canada - Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS) 
ORION Cybernetics' Data Centre Practice provides executive consultantcy and assessment services for a strategic report to capture high-level observations of the current state of Shared Services Canada (SSC) data centers on Vancouver Island and their suitability as candidates for consolidation. 

The Roadmap documents the high-level current state, establishes key consolidation strategies and outline next steps for consolidation within the SSC - Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS) data center (interim end state).  Current State Discovery acquired information through document reviews, questionnaires, meetings, and physical review of systems of a predetermined subset of sites/locations to form an infrastructure baseline. The initial due diligence of relevant documents and subsequent questionnaires helped provide the assessment team a foundation for further due diligence during the site visit(s).  This formed a baseline of comparison against known requirements resulting in a gap analysis and assessment recommendations.

Shared Services Canada - Business Intake Management
Provides Business Impact Analyst(s) within the Business Intake Management group at SSC, responsible for managing the intake of projects coming from various SSC partners and ensuring proper analysis was conducted. 
  • Act as the point of entry (business intake) for the Social Portfolio partner into SSC to get solution design, capacity and costing info from operations.
  • Management of new IM/IT demands for infrastructure services coming from SSC partners/departments.
  • Liaise with functional managers and SMEs to coordinate discussions around technical options and feasibility for various project requests.
  • Liaise with PM services or Service Design/Transition resources to move approved demands through the various operations groups.
  • Develop integrated processes, tools and templates across to support the Business Intake Management group. 
  • Provide strategic and operational capacity recommendations to senior management to address IT infrastructure needs in support of project demands.
  • Support efficient communications with other participants in the migration team on matters of testing/training and documentation

Passport Canada
Provided infrastructure assessment services to complete a current state infrastructure review of Passport Canada’s (PPTC) environment. The scope of the report is directed at infrastructure enabling PPTC business critical services currently being supported by Shared Services Canada International Portfolio. The scope includes data centre, infrastructure, telecom, applications dependent on infrastructure and interdependencies.
  • The resulting assessment report captured current state, recommendations and prioritizations related to the following; 
  • any single points of failure and vulnerabilities;
  • current state redundancy, automation or failovers, spare hot swaps, etc.; q ranking of vulnerabilities and prioritization based on impact; and
  • Identifying gaps and links to other dependencies.
 
Bank of Canada
The Datacenter Migration project is a component of a larger initiative to enhance business continuity, and modernize the Bank’s datacenters, providing an active/active design that will enable improvements in the Bank’s business continuity capabilities and recovery time objectives  for day-to-day and DR/COOP purposes.  A prerequisite to the DCM, the Core Network Upgrade, as a component of the Infrastructure Upgrade and Evolution Program, seeks to enhance the Bank’s network, and enable future technologies such as voice over IP, wireless, unified communications and improved video capabilities such as tele-presence and video to the desktop.

ORION Cybernetics™ provides (a) the Senior Project Manager for both the data centre migration and core network evolution projects providing steersman-ship and oversight support to a multi-disciplinary IT infrastructure and deployment team; and (b) Senior Data Centre Infrastructure Specialist(s) and is a contributor and member of the Core Infrastructure team.

Environment Canada
The Data Center Service Optimization Program mandate is to evaluate Environment Canada's National Data Center (DC) service delivery including the physical environment and Data Center services to Environment Canada clients. The scope of this program includes a variety of projects, work packages and people focused initiates.

The objectives of the program are to:
    1. Align with overall Government of Canada strategy and vision;
    2. Define Long term Data Center vision;
    3. Data Center services supported by a reduced number of locations;
    4. Increase efficiencies and reduce total cost of ownership;
    5. Maximize value to our clients and for Canadians; and
    6. Define new roles and provide training for IT Infrastructure Staff to support data center longer term vision.

Environment Canada
Engaged to provided Data Centre Executive Consultancy - Trusted Advisor services to Environment Canada for the initial advance planning and consolidation strategy development for a National Capital Region data centre build and relocation. Additionally ORION Cybernetics also provided data centre relocation planning and deployment services. Data Centre provisioning and infrastructure design revolve around The Uptime Institute best practices and Tiering standards as defined by TIA-942.

Environment Canada
Entailed the undertaking of an on-site assessment that included review of the Environment Canada Vancouver Data Center as well as interviews with the IT Staff from both the IT operations and Client applications. The scope of assessment includes:
1. Examine capacity requirements based on existing and future anticipated requirements;
2. Review any existing engineering reports on physical power and cooling defining current and available capacity.
3. Examine current state of IM/IT infrastructure, with consideration for the Interactive Weather Station application deployment.

ORION provided findings and recommendations made to alleviate current Power and HVAC issues, as well as a greening/consolidation approach to better utilize existing infrastructure to reduce current space and load. In addition, the report includes a recommended approach to enable continuous monitoring of utilization of infrastructure (with complete statistical analysis) to provide trends and target potential future capacity issues before they occur.

SSi Micro Ltd.
SSi is the largest ISP in Northern Canada, serving more than 60 Northern communities within Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. They specialize in deploying turnkey networks to support the needs of communities that do not have access to terrestrial connectivity. Provided data centre design and infrastructure (architectural, electrical, mechanical and communication) recommendations for SSi's new data centre facility in Ottawa.

Fisheries and Oceans, Canada
Fisheries and Oceans, Canada (DFO) implemented a new IM/IT service delivery model which gave rise to the IT Sustainability Project (ISP). The ISP delivers modernized and revitalized IM/IT services. This national DFO project will establish enterprise-wide comprehensive and consistent management model for IM/IT in the department, and a consolidated, rationalized and sustainable infrastructure designed to support the business outcomes of the Department.ORION is accountable to plan and lead a CGI Facilities Infrastructure team to evaluate and counsel DFO on recommendations for Data Centre facilities consolidation nationally. 

The Canadian Firearms Centre
The Canadian Firearms Centre (CAFC) is implementing a restructuring plan for the delivery of the Canadian Firearms Program, with a new legislative, administrative, organizational, services and technological framework. CGI, operating in an Alternative Service Delivery (ASD) model, provisions: hardware and software; network services; training; help desk and support; and security and back-up of data services and support to a national IP VPN infrastructure comprised of seventy-three (73) sites and over six hundred users.

IT Utility Services Advisor for Infrastructure Deployment Preparedness and Phased Deployment Rollout Command and Control, ORION maintains overall program responsibility and accountability for the National cutover plan. ORION's mandate is to layout the strategy, requirements, responsibilities, activities and key milestones associated with the phased deployment-rollout. Within the context of the resulting WBS, the Rollout Command & Control (RCC) Plan accounts for the manner in which resources shall be mobilized and deployed on a site by site; region-by-region-phase-by-phase basis. Accountabilities include being responsible for infrastructure readiness, site augmentation, audits and operational readiness go/no-go decisions; and maintaining overall responsibility for risk management and mitigation during rollout.

Bell's Secure Electronic Forms 
Bell's Secure Electronic Forms (SEF) is a scalable network centric service designed to meet customers' diverse electronic business forms processing requirements in a secure environment. The SEF service provides a customer commercial entity or government department the ability to create static or intelligent forms, to render forms to, and to capture data via completed forms from end-users of a customer's application without the customer making the substantial investment in knowledge acquisition, infrastructure, application development and on-going maintenance and support. ORION provides project management support to CGI technical authority and deployment team coordination and accountable for project team design integrity performance, governance and change management. SEF was the first consumer of CGI Ottawa's Shared Managed Services Infrastructure, also managed by ORION.

Government of Canada's Shared Travel Services Initiative
The Government of Canada's Shared Travel Services Initiative (STSI) is a self-service travel booking service. The prime contractor for the STSI was Accenture. In the delivery of this service, Accenture called upon the services of many partners including: American Express, Concur Technologies, and Bell. CGI is a subcontractor of Bell. Working with Team Bell, CGI is accountable for the support of a hosted infrastructure in Ottawa.

This infrastructure supports five primary pillars of services: LAN, WAN, Servers, Security & Disaster Recovery. ORION provides program management support to CGI technical authority and deployment team and is the primary interface/liaison to the Team Bell Program Management Office, accountable for project team performance, governance and change management. Additionally ORION provided senior facilities and infrastructure consulting to CGI in support of CGI?s Shared Infrastructure Data Centre (architectural, electrical, mechanical and communications).

Canadian Security Establishment (CSE)
Technical and business lead in analyzing and creating a business and functional framework for a Security Systems Infrastructure information management system.

Nortel Networks
Combined technology labs encompass over 60,000 sq.ft. Additionally ORION Cybernetics is a key infrastructure designer and logistical contributor for Nortel’s Global Internet Data Centre deployment and technology centres dispersed internationally. These include on-site logistics and information management in Canada, Germany, Romania and the United States of America.

Bell Canada
Under contract with Ajilon Communications this project involved moving toward a standard IP addressing standard and elimination of firewall access. From an operational perspective, it meant a move to one corporate standard for design and support of the Integrated Communications Network for Bell holding companies out west (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary).

Based on the established guiding principles and in cooperation with various Bell holding companies (e.g. Bell Canada, Bell Mobility, Bell Nexxia, BDI) and their service partners, ORION took a leadership role in the creation of a strategy to move toward a uniform level and method of support for an Integrated Communications Network and the holding companies' networks. Accountable to create the necessary tactical plans and target dates to move toward the approved strategy. Sold the tactical plans and utilization of the necessary resources to the executive to fulfill on the strategy and handed off approved tactical plans to the key stakeholders for implementation.

Stentor Canadian Network Management
Consulting and project prime for the logistical management of SCNM's migration to a new 185,000 sq.ft. corporate head office in Ottawa. Includes the development, management, delivery and documentation of their PBX, structured cabling, internetworking, Data Centre migration, consolidated labs and end user services deployment (1,000 staff). Change is constant within SCNM as a result of the collapse of Stentor Resource Centre Inc. (SRCI), the repatriation of employees to member companies, substantial organizational restructuring and carrier labour disputes/strike. Our ability to work through these difficulties without detriment to the program is demonstrated within ORION's appointment as SCNM Emergency Work Assignment project managers through the May-99 Bell Canada labour strike. 

University of Ottawa
Professional Management Services in the design, development and implementation of a multi-user, multi-application dependent system focused around Aperture's Visual Information Management System. Design and development provided for streamlined processes, improved tool sets and, where possible, automation of campus wide: gross, net, assignable and non-assignable space calculations; faculty space assignments; facilities management and information technology asset and information management. Services also included the design and development of a multi-user external facilities management database.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
To support MetLife's Canadian lines of business and end-users, ORION contributes as IT prime to the Real Estate, Facilities, Architectural, Construction and IT teams. This initiative is focused to the design, build and commissioning of a consolidated 7,554 square foot Data Center to facilitate MetLife's existing and emerging technologies and applications through the year 2002. The MetLife Canadian Head Office Domain Communications Room (DCR) is a consolidated centre for technology and operational services. The services distributed and supported from this centre house structured cable distribution; switching equipment; transmission equipment; inter-networking; security-systems hardware; distributed computing; mainframe computing; tape services; print services; the operations action centre, power systems distribution; network-systems monitoring and related infrastructure (i.e. UPS/Battery - Generator).

King's Health Centre Corporation
The King's Health Center is a privately-owned user-pay medicine health care facility dedicated to providing services that meet the highest ethical and technical standards. ORION provided professional management services in the selection, acquisition, implementation and management of switched communications, structured cabling, internetwork and distributed computing services to this 180,000 sq.ft. facility.

Perley & Rideau Veterans' Health Centre
Communications prime for the development, design and implementation of digital technology initiatives for a new 400,000 square foot, 450 bed long term and rehabilitation facility for veterans and the general public.

Nipissing Board of Education
In partnership with Bell Advanced Communications, ORION provided hands-on program leadership in the development of the Board's Information Technology Strategic Plan. This is a wide area/integrated community network which enhance and springboard distance learning through a technology platform integrating thirty (30) elementary and secondary schools with linkages to the community and business at large.

Bell Northern Research Ltd.
Prime responsibility for the needs assessment and statement of requirements for an integrated technology and facility management process for the design, construction, commissioning and occupancy of new space, and churn management activities for multiple 1000 user divisional service units.

National Research Council Canada
Working for and under the direction of ISOTRO Network Management Inc. and Public Works Canada, responsibilities included the development and logistical management of building and user audits and the resulting structured cabling design of all NRC Ottawa facilities (1,250,000 gross square feet) relating to the NRC's Information Network Evolution plan.