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Thomas Duryea secures email contract
Peter Dinham
Friday, 02 December 2011 14:39
The email upgrade was flagged as a business critical project under Yarra Valley Water's IT Disaster Recover Improvement Program, with the utility provider saying it was keen to put in place a new email platform which will deliver the level of resiliency and availability required to support their existing and future needs.
'We were initially considering moving to a fully hosted or a cloud offering such as Office 365, however on further examination felt that these would not fully meet our strict DR requirements and we were also concerned about security and data governance,' manager client services at Yarra Valley Water, Anthony Hickling said.
Andrew Thomas, chief executive officer at Thomas Duryea says the new email platform 'ticks all the boxes' in terms of Yarra Valley Water's DR needs.
'We work with over 80% of local councils and government authorities in Victoria and as such have a very deep understanding of their requirements so were able to tailor a solution which met their exacting needs, as well as deliver enhanced total cost of ownership.'
Thomas said the email solution to be deployed by Thomas Duryea was built on Microsoft Exchange 2010 and delivers client access and mailbox services across four servers utilising advanced resiliency and availability features of Exchange 2010, 'which when combined with Yarra Valley Water's dual data centre strategy will provide very high availability and very fast recovery.' The solution also includes integration with Edge services running ForeFront protection for Exchange and cloud filtering to achieve multi-layered security across the Exchange organisation.
TD will also deliver unified messaging for voicemail which Thomas says with allow Yarra Valley Water to save time and money while offering users more convenient access to voicemail messages.
Hickling says that with heightened compliance obligations underpinning the project, TD's 'mature and repeatable processes and project management and delivery methodologies decreased risk' for Yarra Valley Water and provided project certainty.
'With the project flagged as business critical we wanted to ensure we partnered with a company that delivered not only to our tender response, but provided additional level of certainty in respect to project delivery and hand over. The team at Thomas Duryea moved fast, fully engaged with us and placed a strong emphasis on knowledge transfer. They worked as a true partner,' Hickling said.
According to Andew Thomas, the win (with Yarra Valley Water) tops a strong year for Thomas Duryea which recently saw it close its best quarter ever, 'breaking all revenue targets with a 40 per cent year-on-year increase in revenues across the business.'
Thomas said cloud and managed services were the stand out growth areas with revenues up 180 year-on-year, and the company had set itself an 'aggressive organic growth plan which will see us double our size in three years and turn TD into a $100 million business.'
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