FOX CORPORATION
WORLDWIDE NETWORK SERVICES
WINNER
In December 2018, the Walt Disney Company put a definitive agreement to acquire a majority of the business units of 21st Century Fox. Fox Corporation (post Disney Acquisition), Fox Corp.’s Worldwide Network Services team, was tasked with building the “new” Fox Corporation’s converged IT infrastructure with a deadline of spring 2019. The new infrastructure would combine the broadcast workflows from Fox Sports, Fox Networks, and the Fox TV Stations business units with their respective corporate workflows into one converged network, which prior had been completely separate. This combined IT network would incorporate data center, broadcast, campus and security services.
Within this extraordinary challenge was an opportunity to innovate and “future proof” a next generation network as a showcase for the new Fox Corp. Beyond just meeting the demands of today, they were preparing for the exponential demands for broadcast bandwidth, ever-increasing amounts of data storage, corporate application evolution and migration to private/public clouds and the demands and governance requiring the most advanced security. To meet this complex challenge, the team coordinated calls at all hours of the day and night to reach each business unit, in each region to understand their workloads, services required, infrastructure and security needs. The team spent months in planning meetings, site assessments, and client surveys to understand every detail. The successful end result was due to their detailed analysis and planning, combined with their collective decades of experience to create the architecture and framework to deploy the Fox Corporation’s next generation converged IP network, not a minute too soon as the acquisition closed on March 20th 2019.
