Cable&Wireless has secured a 5-year, £12m deal to provide new IP-based network at engineering and design consultancy Atkins.
The new platform will provide a centralised IT architecture across 89 sites in the UK and India.
Atkins used to hold its customer data in onsite file servers backed up by an overlay to a file storage company. This proved to be an expensive and not very efficient method of storing the data that it was legally obliged to safeguard.
“We needed to move away from disparate and costly legacy processes, to a centralised system whilst increasing network resilience and storage, ensuring the end users were not affected,” said Tim Dadswell, IT transition director at Atkins.
The new system will run over Cable&Wireless’ multi-service platform (MSP), which will provide greater bandwidth and an increase in resilience. The centralised architecture will enable Atkins to increase its storage capacity.
To help improve employee communication at Atkins, Cable&Wireless has also implemented IP Centrex, a centralised telephony service that enables workers to use the same telephone number at any location via a personalised PIN.
Cable&Wireless will also provide a managed application performance management (APM) platform, giving Atkins greater visibility into the application traffic that is travelling over its network. The firm will now be able to prioritise business-critical applications and identify other issues that may be causing the network to run slowly.
Cable&Wireless now supports all business-critical applications at Atkins, such as Enterprise Resource Management (ERM). The relationship between the two firms dates back seven years.
Atkins is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games.
