www.citybeach.com.au Building an IT infrastructure can be a high-cost, high-risk proposition. When City Beach decided to add a new dimension to their business by launching an e-commerce portal selling direct to consumers, they wanted a hosting platform that would keep their risks and costs to a minimum.

After a rigorous evaluation, they turned to Brennan’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service – obtaining a reliable and scalable infrastructure delivered with a low up-front capital investment and a 30 per cent total cost of ownership saving.

The Situation

Established 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.

When the company saw an opportunity to connect directly with its customers through an e-commerce website that would sell clothing from its huge catalogue of brands, City Beach CIO Paul Downs was handed the task.

“The plan was to build a new arm of the business in one hundred days,” says Downs. “It was a big challenge, and the hosting infrastructure was an important part of the equation. We needed an infrastructure that could be quickly deployed, and one that would scale with demand, as we were uncertain precisely how popular the online store would be.”

“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.” Paul Downs, City Beach.

The Solution

As one of City Beach’s strategic partners, Brennan was invited to propose a solution. 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, EMC and Cisco.

“What we needed was an enterprise class e-commerce platform,” says Downs. “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.”

With the decision made to use IaaS, the City Beach testing and development environments were able to be set up within ten days. While the project as a whole was a complex challenge – demanding new business processes for warehousing and dispatch, as well as the development of a custom e-commerce store – Downs says that the technology component was simply a non-issue: the hardware, software and hosting environment that Brennan provisioned “just worked.”

Asked about the security implications of IaaS, Downs says that City Beach had no concerns. “Before deciding to subscribe to IaaS, we toured Brennan’s facilities to inspect their access controls, procedures and policies. For most businesses, the security Brennan’s facility offers in terms of protecting their systems and data will be much more than what they could achieve in-house. Certainly, our systems are more secure with Brennan than they would be at City Beach’s head office.”

“Brennan is a supplier capable of treating your business like a real customer. In my experience, there aren’t many ICT providers of that kind around.” Paul Downs, City Beach.

The Benefits

Downs says that the biggest benefits of City Beach’s decision to use Brennan’s IaaS stem from the fact that it is a managed service.

“As CIO, I don’t have to worry about backups, operating system maintenance or network performance. Instead, with a Service Level Agreement in place, I can simply hold Brennan to account when it comes to reliability,” he says. “And if we need more or less capacity, processing power, or storage, we have that flexibility.”

“City Beach is a retail company,” he adds. “It’s my role to enable our business through technology. With IaaS, I can concentrate on building our business, rather than worrying about managing hardware.”

The financial benefits of IaaS are also important, with City Beach expecting to save 30% 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.

Asked about City Beach’s experience with Brennan, Downs says that Brennan have been flexible in their approach and able to listen to City Beach’s concerns and to devise solutions to overcome them.

“Brennan is a supplier capable of treating your business like a real customer. In my experience, there aren’t many ICT providers of that kind around.”

City Beach is now planning to move the remainder of its internal IT infrastructure, including its business systems and applications, to an IaaS solution.

“I’d have no hesitation in recommending Brennan’s IaaS offering to any business who thought it was the right strategic fit for their operations.” Downs says.