Background
This client is one of London’s most popular conference and exhibition venues. With over 200 events and 900,000 visitors a year and based Central London, the venue offers a stylish, flexible and convenient solution for everything from banquets to conferences and exhibitions. The venue also provides over 135,000 square feet of high quality let-able space for showrooms, offices, serviced offices and co-working.
ITSD has been providing IT services to the venue since 2003. A close and harmonious partnership has developed over our many years working together.
The Back Office Challenge
ITSD was initially contracted to support the back-office infrastructure of servers and network equipment for the corporate side of the business, working alongside the in-house IT team.
Built on aging equipment and server software, that had not been expertly maintained and managed, the systems and network where suffering from almost daily failures, which was highly frustrating for users.
The Solution
It was agreed from the outset that the whole back office infrastructure required upgrading, due to its age.
ITSD designed and implemented a server and network environment, which was fit for purpose, built on new robust servers with built in redundancy and managed network switches. The server operating systems were updated to the latest windows versions and the domain was successfully transferred with zero downtime to the users.
Together with the client we designed a roadmap for the future. ITSD have since upgraded the server infrastructure 3 times and it now operates in a high availability mode, based on VMware cluster technology and runs on a fibre backbone. This means not only is the infrastructure fit for purpose now, it will remain so as the demands on it grow and evolve in the future.
The Results
Network and Server services provided to the business have been drastically improved, going from daily failures and loss of IT services to a 99.5% availability. As a result the BDC’s users are now not only far less frustrated they’re also able to be significantly more productive.
The venue and its clients continue to enjoy a very robust, reliable IT infrastructure, with monitored backup and disaster recovery solutions in place.
IT Support Challenge
The client had an in-house team for IT Support, which was under resourced for the task of supporting all the IT needs of the business.
Although the back office and network were now much more reliable, the end points were still troublesome and while users were happier with their network, frustration remained high when it came to their equipment.
The Solution
In 2004 the client’s Board made the decision to outsource all of IT rather than continue providing it in-house.
With much greater IT resources at our disposal, and benefitting from our call management systems, ITSD were able to meet the IT demands of the business far more effectively.
One of our first tasks when taking over support was to introduce a standard computer build for the business. User systems were rebuilt using the new design and additional services such as Anti-Virus, Windows patch management and remote support were introduced. This not only meant that the machines were more reliable but when an issue did arise it could be identified and resolved far more efficiently.
A detailed inventory of computer assets and software was also created, enabling the venue to track and manage its assets and licences correctly.
The Results
With an end to end IT support solution provided by ITSD, the client has been able to concentrate on what they do so well, whilst enjoying highly available reliable IT.
As testimony to everybody’s work, Cyber Essentials certification has been awarded this year.
The Future
ITSD work closely with the Group Financial Director and Venue Services Director to ensure that the IT systems continue to meet the requirements of the business.
Over the years we have been involved in a number of projects, either directly for IT or other projects that have benefited from our input and we will continue to do so.
