Brennan Infrastructure-as-a-Service selected to power City Beach eCommerce platform

Sydney 21 May, 2010 - Leading managed services provider to the mid-market, Brennan, has completed a multi-million dollar cloud computing deal with national retailer City Beach. The three year agreement sees Brennan’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering power City Beach’s eCommerce platform; providing a scalable, secure and fully managed environment to support City Beach’s rapidly growing online presence. As part of the deal Brennan also provides City Beach with networking, maintenance and support services.

The deal is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing wins for Brennan. Revenues from cloud computing are growing at a rate of ten percent a month and the company estimates its sales pipeline of new opportunities to be in excess of $20 million, making it one of the fastest growing product lines for Brennan.

As one of City Beach’s strategic partners, Brennan was invited to propose a solution to support the company’s decision to build an eCommerce business in only one hundred days. Brennan suggested that City Beach adopt an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) based approach that would see the 14 environments required for the project hosted externally on a Brennan supported infrastructure using VMware. Websphere 4 was also deployed in the virtualised environment, believed to be the first deployments of its kind in Australia.

City Beach CIO Paul Downs said: “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. 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.”

Flexibility to change capacity as and when required was another plus for City Beach. “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,” said Downs.

City Beach is expecting to save 30 percent on its total cost of ownership over three years, as compared to an in-house solution. “The economic benefit of the solution is that it shifts the costs of the hosting infrastructure from a capital to an operational expense. City Beach has eliminated the risk of making a large investment in hardware only to find that we’ve under- or over-estimated the capacities required,” says Downs.

Stephen Sims Brennan’s general manager sales and marketing believes Brennan’s early investment in building its own data centres and cloud computing infrastructure is paying off for the company, enabling Brennan to quickly commercialise and release new cloud based solutions ahead of many major players.

“From the outset we wanted to make a significant play in the mid-tier cloud computing market. Our IaaS product for example has now been available commercially for over 12 months and is delivering proven results for our clients.

“I believe we are in a strong position to capitalise on the growing demand for cloud services as we can offer a complete solution unlike Telco’s who do not have the IT knowledge to provide the necessary support to help clients transition to the cloud, and IT companies who do not have the Telco knowledge to provide the networking services required to deliver cloud computing solutions,” said Sims.

Sims adds that Brennan will continue to further expand its cloud computing capability with further investment in infrastructure planned for the year ahead.

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About BrennanBrennan is a privately owned IT services company that provides a complete range of fully managed and secured IT and Telecommunications solutions to mid sized businesses across Australia and New Zealand. Since 1997, Brennan has taken a leadership position in the design and delivery of new technology offerings that meet the evolving needs of the mid-market and provides their clients with a competitive-edge. The Company employs more than 200 individuals and has offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Newcastle. For more information visit: www.brennanit.com.au

About City BeachEstablished in 1985, City Beach is one of Australia’s best known clothing retailers, with stores in Perth, Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. For more information visit: www.citybeach.com.au