CASE STUDY A CUSTOMER PALL - EX
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Sean Sherwin-Smith is the director of IT at Pall-Ex. Since joining the network just over a year ago, having worked for Ceva Logistics, TNT Express and UPS, he has overseen a substantial move towards externallyhosted IT services. "Joining the company, the first thing I did was to kick out non-core systems," he reveals.
Pall-Ex was managing its own website and applications: "We have a small in-house support team who would be better utilised supporting our customers just under 100 depots in the UK, 60 in Italy and 60 email/CAM users around 400 systems in the UK alone." Sherwin-Smith says that support levels were "adequate" rather than "proactive".
He wanted to replace older systems, minimise invoicing and reduce the need for account management a hosted solution could meet all these needs. He says: "You pay a fixed cost per user per month, and you always have the latest system."
Other criteria included a robust system, with a disaster recovery programme and the facility for mobile working.
Sherwin-Smith looked at two suppliers, and the winner was Outsourcery (see panel right).
The contract's Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees 99.9% uptime "that's fairly standard, and more than you would ever get from an internal system," reveals SherwinSmith. "If we had an email outage for an hour, I'd have to write a report to the board.
"It's quite alarming how many operators don't have any kind of disaster recovery or even backup in place or their idea of backup is a USB memory stick! I save documents to the [hosted] Z drive, which has full disaster recovery built in so if I drop my laptop and the Pall-Ex server blows up, I can go home and log on there."
The hosted set-up has been in place since last March, and has hardly changed the users' experience. "They don't even notice," says Sherwin-Smith. "They still get their emails, so they're happy. The people who have noticed are external workers, who get their emails much quicker."
Most of Pall-Ex's applications are now on the hosted system email, CAM, company intranet and Sharepoint (a file-sharing system) while the billing system and a few remaining applications will migrate by the end of 2010.
The system can be accessed through any web browser: "Microsoft stuff works better on Internet Explorer [Microsoft's own web browser, installed on most PCs] but you can use it with Firefox or Google Chrome it just doesn't look as pretty," explains Shemin-Smith, adding that hardware requirements are minimal. "All our users need is a browser, so they can use anything a desktop PC, laptop, PDA or smartphone. The only things I can't access from my iPhone are Sharepoint and our CRM system."
You don't need high-speed broadband to use a hosted service -a typical domestic line is enough for most purposes. Sherwin-Smith says that his office's 10Mb (10 Megabits/ second) ADSL is ample for the hosted set-up: "If you've got more than 50 employees and a 2Mb connection, you might struggle but bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper."
But what if the site's broadband connection goes down? "I could use a mobile web dongle. or I have a cheap phone with a USB socket so I can connect a PC to the internet."
He reckons that basic hosted email would cost around £10 per user per month, and compares this with the cost of in-house hardware and software that Pall-Ex would have needed to upgrade around £30,000 for basic email, plus perhaps £20,000 on top for backup, anti-virus protection and disaster recovery.
"We highly recommend that our members go for a hosted solution rather than an in-house system," urges Sherwin-Smith. A 10-user set-up might cost £500 per month covering not just email, but a full intranet system with complete backup and disaster recovery. A mobile data package would add a little to the cost. "If you have a site with 10 users, it's a no-brainer, and it's economical all the way through to an international company.
"If you have 100 sites and 100 people at each, a hosted solution becomes very expensive but it still has advantages."