Managed service provider, Brennan IT, has landed a multimillion dollar cloud services deal with surf wear retailer, City Beach.
Under the three-year agreement, Brennan’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering will be used to power the retailer’s e-commerce platform and provide a scalable, secure and fully managed environment. It also includes networking, maintenance and support services.
The platform is based on a VMware and IBM’s WebSphere 4 virtualised environment.
Brennan general sales and marketing manager, Stephen Sims, said City Beach wanted on-demand services which could scale up or down quickly to suit its needs. It also required the system to be in place within 100 days.
“We’ve got many clients on the platform and that was one of the key reasons they decided to move forward with us,” he said. “We had to meet some quick timeframes, which was easy because it was pre-built.”
The retailer previously didn’t have an e-commerce platform in place and was investigating whether to maintain in-house infrastructure, run off a third-party datacentre, or adopt a cloud-based solution. Sims said IaaS should save 30 per cent on its total cost of ownership over three years, as compared to an in-house solution.
City Beach CIO, Paul Downs, said it needed an enterprise-class e-commerce platform, but to build one internally would have meant building a datacentre at its head office, hiring new staff and making sizeable hardware investments.
“We considered co-location and in-house, however the business case showed that IaaS performed significantly better than other options,” Downs said. “The utility model provides us with the flexibility to adjust capacity, processing power, or storage to suit demand without large technology investments or having to deal with the costs associated with technology refreshes and maintenance. This frees me up to focus on broader strategic issues to improve overall business performance.”
Sims said Brennan’s IaaS business had been growing at a steady rate of at least 10 per cent per month since the start of this financial year. At the moment, it was looking to hire more staff and had about 20 job vacancies across its consulting and sales teams in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, he said.
