May 20, 2010Leading managed services provider to the mid-market
Brennan has completed a multimillion dollar cloud computing deal with national retailer
City Beach.
The three-year agreement sees Brennan’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering power City Beach’s e-commerce platform; providing a scalable, secure and fully managed environment to support the retailers rapidly growing online presence.
As part of the deal Brennan also provides City Beach with networking, maintenance and support services.
The deal is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing wins for Brennan, which operates in Brisbane but is headquartered in Sydney.
Revenues from cloud computing are growing at a rate of ten percent a month and the company estimates its sales pipeline of new opportunities to be in excess of $20 million.
As one of City Beach’s strategic partners, Brennan was invited to propose a solution to support the company’s decision to build an e-commerce business in only one hundred days.
Brennan suggested that City Beach adopt an IaaS-based approach which would see the 14 environments required for the project hosted externally on a Brennan supported infrastructure using VMware.
Websphere 4 was also deployed in the virtualised environment, believed to be the first deployments of its kind in Australia.
PLATFORM BENEFITSCity Beach CIO Paul Downs says the business saw a need for an enterprise class e-commerce platform.
“To host such a platform internally would mean building a data centre at our head office, hiring new staff and making a sizeable capital investment in hardware,” he says.
“The case Brennan made for IaaS was much more commercially compelling, outlining a raft of benefits in terms of performance, scalability, speed of deployment and cost.”
Flexibility to change capacity as and when required was another plus for City Beach.
“We considered co-location and in house, however the business case showed that IaaS performed significantly better than other options,” Downs says.
“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, freeing me up to focus on broader strategic issues to improve overall business performance,” he says.
EXPECTED SAVINGS
City Beach is expecting to save 30 percent on its total cost of ownership over three years, as compared to an in-house solution.
“The economic benefit of the solution is that it shifts the costs of the hosting infrastructure from a capital to an operational expense,” Downs explains.
“City Beach has eliminated the risk of making a large investment in hardware only to find that we’ve under or over-estimated the capacities required,” he adds.