Security Software, IT Infrastructure & Business Continuity

The bezier group/Star – exclusive interview

bezier was born in May 1998 following a management buyout of the former Wace print group. This provided bezier with a manufacturing base and the capacity to grow into the UK’s leading retail marketing agency. It has also added services such as design and consultancy in response to customer demand. bezier has grown rapidly since 2000, with turnover tripling to £80 million between 2004 and 2007. In June 2008 the group combined all its creative shopper marketing expertise under one agency, Coutts Creative Shopper Marketing. A B2B digital agency, enyanga, was also launched, and a new consultancy agency, retail why, was also formed to demonstrate the ROI of campaigns and evaluate what works, and what does not. Previously bezier had managed its own point-to-point network with a central hub – but with the growing demands being placed on the business it was becoming crucial to have a more robust, scalable and resilient network architecture. Having worked with Star for several years and gradually moving a number of services online with them, they were obviously bezier's first port of call.

Nottingham Building Society/Esteem – exclusive interview

Founded in 1849, Nottingham Building Society has grown to become a top 20 building society with assets of over £3 billion. It is one of the most successful regional building societies in the UK with a network of branches in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire. Savings and mortgages have been the core products offered by The Nottingham. It has won several industry awards for the quality of its mortgage services and financial advice, but in today’s competitive financial services market, it realised further improvements were needed to increase flexibility in product range; enhance both external (customer) and internal (branch and head office) communication; and maintain competitive advantage. It had decided on a new package, Summit from TietoEnator, but knew it would be a daunting task implementing this. It therefore decided to totally reconstruct its IT infrastructure to provide a robust, secure and compliant foundation that could take the business forward and chose Esteem as a partner for the project.

Somerset County Council/VirtualizeIT

Somerset County Council provides a diverse range of services to the public of Somerset. The county council has been in existence for over 100 years and the increase in the dependency on electronic data places considerable demand on its IT infrastructure. This dependency and the increase in demand had led to an inevitable increase in the number of servers providing key services. The data centre was approaching the limits of physical capacity and the number of servers was causing management issues, as well as environmental issues in terms of power usage and heat output. The council had already identified the need to implement VMware but was searching for a partner that not only had an understanding of virtualisation technology, but had a proven track record in successful production implementations. Somerset County Council embarked on a partnership with VirtualizeIT to correctly scope and define the deliverables to be achieved by implementing a virtual infrastructure within its data centre.

Home Farm Foods/IBM

Founded over 12 years ago, Home Farm Foods is one of the UK’s leading providers of home-delivered meals for older people. With a range of over 300 products, the company prides itself on the quality of its food and the high levels of customer service it offers. Achieving national coverage through a network of 27 regionally based franchised distributors, Home Farm Foods is an innovative company with plans for substantial growth. It is keen to improve its IT infrastructure to support these plans while enhancing its service. The nature of Home Farm Foods’ business means that tens of thousands of transactions take place every week and data related to these represents valuable information used for planning, marketing and key business decisions. As the business grew, it became obvious that significant IT improvements were needed. Following a recommendation from IBM, Home Farm Foods chose Premier IBM Business Partner Triangle to help address its short-term problems and suggest a longer-term IT strategy for its business.

Menzies Distribution/Sun Microsystems – exclusive interview

Part of John Menzies plc, Menzies Distribution is a leading provider of distribution and marketing services to the UK newspaper and magazine supply chain. Each day Menzies distributes over 2.5 million magazines, covering more than 3,000 different titles, and 4 million newspapers (6 million on Sundays) to over 23,000 retail customers. The company also provides marketing services to retailers and publishers, such as sales promotions, range management and merchandising services to help maximise sales revenues. Menzies Distribution realised that its existing allocations and forecasting system was beginning to show its age, so it decided to re-develop the application using its inhouse development team. It produced a new solution, called i-Mag, for magazine distribution. This was later followed by i-News for newspaper distribution. Menzies Distribution needs the correct hardware and network infrastructure on which to run its applications. As the business is operated nationally, it currently has a distributed IT environment, with powerful Sun Microsystems servers in each of the 25 locations.

BAA/C&C Technology Consulting

BAA is the world’s largest airport operator, responsible for seven UK airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted; the management of 10 international airports; and the retail management of two US airports, as well as a variety of airport consultancy, property and railway interests. The organisation’s main focus is on managing the safe and rapid arrival and departure of aeroplanes. Its IT systems need to enable effective working, both internally and across its complex network of business partners. The critical nature of BAA’s operations, combined with the need for effective delivery of a dynamic and reliable IT infrastructure, led it to engage the expertise of existing framework consulting supplier, C&C Technology, to renew its desktop IT infrastructure.

McVey & Murricane/Double-Take Software

Investment in people and an innovative approach to IT has enabled McVey & Murricane to establish itself as one of the most progressive legal practices in Scotland. A small practice with institutional clients, the firm is achieving remarkable growth. Its main service areas focus on providing remortgaging services to a number of banks and conveyancing services to estate agencies and a major high-street lender. With a varied and increasing workload, further complicated by compliance obligations placed on the firm by its work with larger ‘corporate’ clients, McVey & Murricane recognised the need for a more resilient IT infrastructure. McVey & Murricane selected Xpedient Business Solutions as its preferred consultant and supplier, and worked with Xpedient to develop and implement an innovative and cost-effective solution centred on the Double-Take Software award-winning data replication product, Double-Take.

NRW/enteo & FrontRange

The financial management department of the German region of North Rhine-Westphalia (RZF) serves 137 tax offices, two regional financial management offices and three training establishments from its data centre, employing fully 600 IT staff to support 32,000 workstations. 17,000 of these are Citrix terminals, meaning the applications are not hosted on the workstations themselves but on central servers. This brings with it many advantages, including lower licensing, installation and maintenance costs and significant time savings when upgrading software. Automated management of the RZF Citrix servers allows the Citrix Mainframe Presentation Server technology to deliver even greater value, and the tool that enables this to happen is enteo’s NetInstall solution.

VIA Travel/FrontRange

Lise Aune, IT operations manager at VIA Travel, was sceptical about being an early adopter. But she had confidence in the concept behind FrontRange IT Service Management, so put her scepticism aside. Now she is an avid fan. Good work procedures and efficient processes have a big impact on the bottom line. Aune was on the lookout for the best solution for VIA Travel’s IT operations department. She wanted operations to run more efficiently and found the solution in ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). To achieve its goals more quickly, VIA Travel decided to implement FrontRange IT Service Management (ITSM) as the basis of the solution.

Nalco/Casewise

Nalco is the world leader in water treatment and process improvement applications, providing services, chemicals and equipment to industrial and institutional customers. Its 60,000 customers are diversified across multiple industries and generated sales of $3.3 billion in 2005. SAP implementation projects, ITIL, Sarbanes-Oxley and data stewardship are key initiatives that Nalco has been implementing with success. The real challenge is to be able after the project phase to still deliver value through the ongoing business processes. Success is an alchemy of process, people and tools. For this last component Nalco relies on Corporate Modeler from Casewise and IT Accelerator.

G's Marketing/Anglia Business Solutions – exclusive interview

Founded in 1952, G’s Marketing Ltd has expanded to become a leading UK and European grower in the fast-growing fresh produce market with an annual turnover of £190 million. The company is headquartered near Ely in Cambridgeshire. It has five sites in the UK and further sites in Spain, Ireland, Holland and Belgium. In terms of new technology direction, G’s Marketing faces increasingly stringent requirements from its customers which differ from customer to customer. To help address them, G’s Marketing, helped by Anglia Business Solutions, is investing in new IT infrastructure to support its business processes, particularly its quality assurance process.

Standard Life/VMware

Standard Life Group is one of the UK’s leading financial services companies, with more than £100 billion assets under management and 7 million customers worldwide. The company offers a comprehensive range of services including banking, private medical insurance, pensions and life assurance. In 2000, the company began to streamline its systems by standardising hardware and operating systems, moving data onto a storage area network (SAN) and exploring various consolidation approaches. The Information Systems Operational Services (ISOS) group is a 500-strong team responsible for supplying a range of operational services to Standard Life. In 2004, when Standard Life began its plan to demutualise and float on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the company looked for ways to improve IT service in a more efficient manner. Having identified a requirement for virtual infrastructure, Standard Life assessed both VMware and Microsoft virtualisation solutions. The company chose VMware software because of its product maturity and the wider range of operating systems it supported.