Tech Success Awards: When The Cloud Is Right

In the summer of 2012, TechWeekEurope launched the Tech Success awards to celebrate IT projects that exceed expectations and make a difference.

Now, it is time to find more about the winners. The award for the most successful Cloud project of 2011-2012 went to the UK operation of supply chain finance (SCF) specialist Orbian, for moving its operations into the cloud with Adapt.

Orbian used Adapt’s Enterprise Virtual Data Centre (eVDC) platform to future-proof its operations, by moving to an on-demand model and leaving infrastructure management to the professionals.

Success story

Orbian is one of the world’s leading non-bank supply chain finance companies. It was founded in 1999, and has since processed $70 billion worth of transactions.

In the last few years, Orbian began to realise that its projected growth in transaction volume and web service usage would exceed the capacity of an aging infrastructure. So the company started looking for a partner, someone who could deliver a hosting platform that would scale with the business needs, and take responsibility for management of all generic IT tasks so Orbian would be free to focus on innovation in the SCF field.

Additionally, migration to a new service would have to be completed in just six months, with minimal impact on customers that depend on Orbian’s services to run their own.

UK-based IT service provider Adapt rose to the challenge, with its eVDC platform – a purebred Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. Orbian says eVDC allowed it to leverage enterprise compute resources that would have otherwise been out of reach.

The company has also appreciated the ‘pay as you use’ model which allowed it to only pay for the computing resources it actually needs.

The project was delivered on time and to budget, and has been running without production service outages for over a year. Orbian says the transition didn’t disrupt customer-facing operations, while improving transaction engine performance by 80 percent, and online customer login times by 85 percent.

“We particularly liked the architectural elegance of the platform which fully embraced the IaaS cloud paradigm, unlike other vendor solutions which offered more expensive, blended hosting approaches,” said a Huw Jones, IT director of Orbian, who managed the project in partnership with the company’s treasurer, Andrew Notman (shown here with the award).

There were also other, unexpected benefits: simplification of disaster recovery documentation and system procedures allowed to reduce recovery time to “minutes rather than days”, and access to Adapt’s IT expertise helped the company cut down on its own IT spend.

“With ambitious growth targets, the eVDC’s flexibility provides the perfect technology platform moving forward from which we can build new business as well as supporting our existing customer base,” said Jones.

We congratulate the team at Orbian on their Tech Success!

Here, you can read more about the winner in the public sector IT category, the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust. Look out for more stories about Tech Success winners in the coming weeks!

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