Case Studies
Provident Financial partners with Node4 for data centre outsourcing
Provident Financial specialises in home credit for private individuals, loans of typically £300 to £400 with repayments collected weekly from customers’ homes. It has some highly specific sector needs such as weekly reporting and also supports over 180 branch offices and 12,000 self employed agents across the UK and Ireland.
A year ago, Provident Financial undertook a review of its business and decided that it should consolidate and outsource its data centre operations as part of its planned move of its Bradford HQ (on the outskirts of Bradford) to a new location in the city centre. A significant factor to the move was that the cost of building a new data centre would be in excess of £7-8million which was a significant up-front investment. The company previously used four data centres located at various points across the UK and Northern Ireland but wanted a data centre supplier which was locally sited (to supply the time-critical access its staff required); provided the state-of-the-art facilities it wanted; and was focussed on excellent customer service. Additionally it had extremely tight deadlines as the move had to be completed in 12 months.
Provident_Financial_Node4.pdf
Supplier:Node4
End-User: Provident Financial
Heriot-Watt University case study
Heriot-Watt University’s Institute of Petroleum Engineering runs a research programme, the Edinburgh Time-Lapse Project (ETLP), which relies on data that has been provided by industry sponsors, such as BP and Shell. The Institute recognised that its IT infrastructure could no longer provide the processing power or storage space that the research team needed for accessing and storing vital information for its pioneering research.
The University required a specialist High Performance Computing partner to facilitate a solution that focused on scalability, availability and rapid deployment while providing 100 terabytes of disk space to archive data. Following consultation with systems integrator, Esteem Systems, the Institute asked Esteem to design and implement a High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster based on Sun Microsystems technology.
Heriot_Watt_University_Esteem.pdf
Supplier:Esteem Systems
End-User: Heriot-Watt University - Institute of Petroleum Engineering
Tower Hamlets Community Housing and Sovereign Business Integration
Tower Hamlets Community Housing’s (THCH) first foray into outsourcing has proved a success, with Sovereign Business Integration delivering a more robust, reliable and well managed IT infrastructure. THCH is keen to build upon this improvement and has embarked upon a three year outsourcing contract with Sovereign.
Tower_Hamlets_Community_Housing.pdf
Supplier:Sovereign Business Integration
End-User: Tower Hamlets Community Housing
Martin Brokers and Oncore IT
Martin Brokers is the world’s longest standing wholesale broking firm in the financial markets and is headquartered in the City of London. Its customers are typically financial institutions such as banks, pension funds, hedge funds and insurance companies. Martin Brokers provides international access to the best rates for a range of financial products, such as long and short term financing, commercial paper, certificates of deposit, forward foreign exchange, bonds, medium term notes, private placements and derivatives. These all rely on the company’s IT setup to provide robust and always-on access to continually shifting market data.
Martin_Brokers_case_study.pdf
Supplier:Oncore IT
End-User: Martin Brokers
London Borough of Merton and Me-learning
Social care for children and young adults in the UK sees a relatively rapid turnover of staff, making training for new employees a costly ongoing necessity. It is estimated that the social care sector loses £78 million per year due to this high employee turnover. Furthermore, nationwide social care staff shortages mean busier social care workers with less time for training, even though post-qualification training is an essential part of their working lives as procedures and protocols are always being changed and updated. Recognising that its existing classroom-based training was reaching capacity, the London Borough of Merton saw e-learning as an opportunity to provide a more accessible, extensive and effective additional training programme. When a full-time trainer left the team 18 months ago, Merton decided to allocate part of its ICS (Integrated Children’s System) training grant to e-learning.
London_Borough_of_Merton_-_Me_Learning.pdf
Supplier:Me-learning
End-User: London Borough of Merton
Parkeon and Future Processing
The Parkeon Group is the UK market leader in transport ticketing systems. In 2008 the firm began developing a new, powerful smartcard-based e-ticketing platform, called eBus, that would support a number of smartcard types defined by the ITSO standard. The standard allows passengers travelling across the UK to use the same card with various ITSO-compliant services providers. Parkeon runs a core in-house IT development team in the UK. When development for the eBus platform came up, the Parkeon team decided that outsourcing would be the most appropriate route.
Parkeon_case_study.pdf
Supplier:Future Processing
End-User: Parkeon
Shipleys LLP and Ramsac
Shipleys LLP set up its first Citrix based network in 1999 as an ideal way to share its time and fees systems across its offices, whilst hosting all its systems on one set of centrally located servers. Because Shipleys LLP is highly dependent on its IT systems, which are shared over a number of geographically dispersed offices, it called upon outsourced IT specialists ramsac to audit its IT systems in 2007 and has employed them since as their ongoing IT support service and strategic advisor.
ramsac_case_study_-_Shipleys.pdf
Supplier:Ramsac
End-User: Shipleys LLP
