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Evans Cycles manages IT service savings

By Retail Technology | Monday November 18 2013

The UK’s largest cycle retailer has made availability and resilience gains as well as costs savings by moving its IT infrastructure over to new managed IT services

Evans Cycles recently revealed it had signed up for improved IT capabilities with new managed services from UK cloud and IT service provider, InTechnology.
 
Evans Cycles has 50 stores across the UK as well as a mature e-commerce operation, with its information and communications technology (ICT) supported by an internal team of six. Connectivity, agility and resilience between the head office and across the network of stores are essential, with both data and telephony underpinning the smooth running of this major retail enterprise.

Updating IT infrastructure 
 
When the Evans Cycles IT team was tasked with replacing its aging telephony infrastructure and reducing spend, it approached potential outsourcing partners for a solution. 

During initial discussions with InTechnology, there emerged a number of distinct issues arising from Evans’ legacy infrastructure. Along with the corporate private branch exchange (PBX) that was no longer meeting the needs of a lean, fast-moving organisation, there was evidence of significant overcharging from the retailer’s existing calls and lines provider. A growing data estate was also putting pressure on a tape-based backup system that was unreliable.

By moving to InTechnology’s managed services, Evans Cycles has benefitted from upgraded legacy systems, solved growing data storage and security issues while reducing IT spend.
 
Evans Cycles’ move to InTechnology’s managed backup service has not only removed a system administration burden, it has increased the speed of restores, reduced the backup window and added an extra layer of security to their disaster recovery strategy, providing peace of mind.

Increasing infrastructure resilience
 
InTechnology then moved Evans’ head office phone system onto its hosted internet protocol (IP) telephony platform and took control of its entire calls and lines estate. This centrally hosting infrastructure has allowed the cycle retailer to bring online three new stores, both quickly and within budget.
 
Richard Twinn, IT support manager for Evans Cycles, said: “InTechnology offers a lot more than just a ‘home’ in its data centres. Theirs is truly a managed service, leveraging not just their physical Cloud infrastructure but their people, their skills and their resources to deliver ‘end-to-end’ solutions and leave client IT teams to focus on more-added value activities.”

Evans Cycles has reduced its IT costs by 20% according to Natalie Duffield, sales director at InTechnology. And Twinn added: “What we found really encouraging was the genuine prospect of significant performance improvement with cost reduction – that was exactly the ‘double whammy’ the company was looking to us as a team to achieve.”

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