About Gloucester City Homes

Gloucester City Homes is an independent social landlord providing excellent housing management services to over 5,200 tenants. They own and manage around 4,500 rented homes, 501 sheltered housing properties, 270 leasehold properties, 25 commercial units and 21 homeless units.

They are recognised as one of the best housing providers in the country through independent accreditation, including the cabinet office Customer Service Excellence Standard. Gloucester City Homes has ambitious plans to invest in tenants homes, build new homes and create new job opportunities as a major employer in the city of Gloucester.

Solution 

As part of the engagement, Gloucester City Homes wanted to ensure its IT infrastructure refresh would result in better customer service standards. Since all services are delivered down a single piece of fibre, Gloucester City Homes has the flexibility to easily scale or adapt its infrastructure to meet its changing needs. In addition, Exponential-e provided managed service support and security assurance so that GCH didn't have to invest large amounts of resource in managing the system.

As part of becoming a digital-first organisation, Exponential-e provided GCH with Hosted Data Centre services, Server Replication to a second Data Centre as well as Managed Firewall, Infrastructure support. Exponential-e's super-fast 100 Gig Ethernet Network delivered the virtual desktop infrastructure that provides employees with access to a persistent, personal desktop from any device or location for all 120 staff.

In just a short space of time GCH has already seen the benefits that a secure and stable infrastructure delivers. Staff can now move from a desk to a meeting room to home and pick up their desktop in exactly the same state as they left it.

GCH recently underwent a programme where its 5,200 tenants needed to renew their tenancy agreements as part of its separation from the council. Previously this would have been a manual, paper-based process. However, the flexibility of the infrastructure has meant that GCH have been able to use a combination of mobile phones and laptops to run events that allow tenants to refresh their agreements from designated locations throughout the city, something that was more convenient for its tenants and enabled more efficient processing. Instead of tenants completing vast amounts of paperwork and staff entering this on to the system manually, the information could be processed immediately on-site.

Staff at GCH experienced a noticeable improvement to user-experience with quicker log-in and load times, as well faster processing time for data / screen refreshes. For the organisation, this brings significant productivity gains.

• Gloucester City Homes has enabled its employees to work in a more productive way; there has been an increase in the allowance of flexible working, primarily due to the solution provided by Exponential-e allowing employees to work on the same work applications from any location. This in turn leads to better satisfaction amongst the workforce and also improved customer service levels.
• The replication of server data to a second Data Centre means that Gloucester City Homes can rest assured they are protected in the event of a disaster. They can promptly and easily access their data from a secondary source and quickly get their business up and running again if the need arises.

 Challenges

Gloucester City Homes (GCH) has successfully transitioned from operating as an arm's length management organisation with all its ICT infrastructure and services being provided by the local council, to an independent body with complex backend demands controlling everything from renewing tenancy agreements to managing burst drains. The transition has given GCH independent control over housing assets and necessitated all tenants to sign new occupancy agreements.

The separation from the council gave GCH the opportunity to refresh their IT strategy and transfer to new IT infrastructure. They wanted a provider that could offer a diversity of provisioned services and ensure they continue improving customer service levels. In terms of previous support, they had an in-house team managing applications; but also used costly outsourced technical and support resources. A need to enable their staff to work remotely and from various locations, such as within the homes of tenants, also meant that they were looking for a provider that could deliver a remote desktop service and increase the productivity and flexibility of their employees.

About Middlesex University

Solution 

Middlesex University is a global institution and innovator that continuously seeks to utilise technology to enhance learning, teaching and working across its campuses. The use of Cloud technology and the managed services Exponential-e provides will enable the University to significantly enrich the student and staff experience.

Using the flexibility provided by the Cloud, Middlesex University will be able to easily turn on additional services, such as server provisioning, central processing units (CPU) and Network bandwidth to ensure that reliable, modern hardware is underpinning systems and activities at all time. The flexible service provides Middlesex University with the agility to scale services to cater for short periods of time when additional capacity is required, for example, in response to new multi-partner academic research projects. It also means that test and development environments can be scaled back when they are not required to achieve further cost savings.

Spearheading the project is David Lozdan, Head of Public Sector for Exponential-e, who confirmed that:

"Moving to the Cloud will ensure that Middlesex University can continue enriching the learning and working experience of more than 45,500 students globally and 1,700 staff by easily extending the use of new applications as they become available. Exponential-e will deliver the supporting platforms and services that will enable Middlesex University to concentrate on achieving its vision; to strengthen student achievement, bolster student satisfaction, support leadership and enhance staff performance."

To deliver a highly secure and resilient platform, the Cloud technology is seamlessly integrated into Exponential-e's wholly owned high capacity Network, ensuring that hosted services reside on the clean side of the firewall. Using the Network, the University will also gain greater visibility into the activity that is taking place across its infrastructure to better manage its capacity, quickly respond to changing demands and provide robust security incident and event management.

 Challenges

Middlesex University has selected British Cloud and Network provider Exponential-e, to enhance research opportunities and learning experiences for students and staff, while driving greater business efficiency. Exponential-e will use its UK based Data Centres to provide on demand Cloud technology, which enables a fast and flexible environment that supports the University's wide-ranging activities.

About The Careys Group

The Carey Group, established in 1969, is a leading multidisciplined construction and resource recovery group, operating across the UK and Ireland. Careys deliver innovative, safe and sustainable solutions to the most complex challenges.

They are unique within the construction industry as they have in-house specialist capabilities in asbestos, demolition, civil engineering, dry lining, house building and resource recovery. Their combined service capabilities means they can deliver consolidated programmes with reduced project costs, consistency and effective management of construction risks.

Solution 

To fulfil The Carey Group's primary IT requirements Exponential-e was tasked to move their data across to a platform that used a combination of our private, secure Cloud platform and Microsoft Office 365. We were able complete the project in just 3 months whilst ensuring zero downtime during the transition period.

Our team of Professional services managers successfully completed the transition from start to finish, ensuring that everything went smoothly and impressing the Carey Group with their high levels of support and competence.

The fact that Exponential-e already supplied their 100GigE low latency WAN solution to Careys meant that they had the confidence in us to design and implement a robust technical solution that was aligned to their IT strategies.

Our solution was underpinned by our resilient Network - ensuring that Carey's had the best base from which to launch their Cloud and email platform.

By using an outsourced model managed by Exponential-e, Carey's made cost efficiencies as they eliminated the time internal IT staff traditionally spent managing their email systems.

The change from a capital expenditure to operating expenditure model has allowed Carey's to directly apportion a predictable monthly cost to the service.

Equally with the scalability of the solution, the cost of operations has decreased and the overall system is far more cost effective.

• One of the primary benefits of the implementation of this solution is that it is cost effective and fits with the company's OPEX model.
• The company has seen a reduction in the time their IT department needs to spend in managing their email system. Through the combination of our ongoing support and the use of Office 365, their email system will be fully managed and any patches or updates applied.
• Inbox storage capacity increased across the company.
• By using Exponential-e the movement of user data and the implementation of the new system were completed without any disruption to the business and took only 3 months to implement. This allowed the business to quickly move from one solution to another, without having to face any system downtime.
• The storage capacity of their email system was increased through use of this new solution, which was a benefit for all employees within the company.

 Challenges

Faced with ageing internal email infrastructure that they were unable to fully manage and support, the Carey Group looked to find a solution that would allow them to move their data to a private Cloud platform whilst also utilising Microsoft Office 365. By outsourcing this service to Exponential-e they were able to ensure that they had a secure and resilient solution that was scalable and fully met their business needs.

The Carey Group's primary challenge was how to move their email data for their 1000+ users across to the new platform whilst ensuring the implementation was completed swiftly and smoothly to avoid business disruption, yet maintaining data integrity.

With their existing WAN provided by Exponential-e they looked to us to provide the professional services to make both a successful data transition and also ensure ongoing support for the day to-day management of the solution.

Exponential-e offered us a complete WAN solution that was technically superior to anything else we looked at, backed up by plain speaking people who have made the transition from a complicated in-house solution far easier than we ever envisaged.

Matt Coniam Head of ICT, The Careys Group.