IaaS life's a (City) Beach for Brennan

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 20 May 2010 10:53

IT Industry - Deals

Clothing retailer City Beach will use Brennan's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to underpin its eCommerce efforts.

A multi-million dollar deal will see Brennan provide IaaS to clothing retailer City Beach for the next three years as an alternative to building an in-house data centre.

"What we needed was an enterprise class e-commerce platform. To host such a platform internally would mean building a data centre at our head office, hiring new staff and making a sizeable capital investment in hardware," said City Beach CIO Paul Downs.

Instead, Brennan proposed an IaaS approach involving VMware and Websphere 4. "The case Brennan made for IaaS was much more commercially compelling, outlining a raft of benefits in terms of performance, scalability, speed of deployment and cost," said Downs.

"We considered co-location and in house, however the business case showed that IaaS performed significantly better than other options. The utility model provides us with the flexibility to adjust capacity, processing power, or storage to suit demand without large technology investments or having to deal with the costs associated with technology refreshes and maintenance, freeing me up to focus on broader strategic issues to improve overall business performance," he added.

The multi-million dollar contract - which includes networking, maintenance and support services - is expected to save City Beach 30% on its total cost of ownership over three years compared to an in-house solution, and eliminates the risk of under or over-estimating the amount of hardware and software needed to run the ecommerce operation.

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