The Brett Group is fundamentally changing its approach to IT in order to address its business needs in the current economic climate. The investment with Esteem Systems will enable independent construction and building materials specialist, the Brett Group, to reduce costs by a minimum of £2.6 million over five years and become a more responsive and competitive organisation as trading times toughen.

Jay Moyes, Group Head of IS at The Brett Group, who instigated the project, comments, "In the current economic landscape we must concentrate on improving customer service, winning new business and increasing our business agility, rather than spending time on day to day tasks to keep our current systems running such as fixing server errors. This is a significant and strategic investment to help meet our current and future business needs. It will improve productivity for our 600 IT users and provide a rapid return on investment."

Brett's IT infrastructure, with 13 server rooms located across 80 geographically dispersed sites, made it difficult for the IT department to meet existing service level agreements (SLAs). Moyes continues, "Some remote sites, such as our quarry locations, only have one or two users making support and maintenance costly and time consuming. Esteem's centralised and virtualised approach will reduce the complexity of the IT system and lower the total cost of ownership for our 600 users."

Direct bottom line benefits will see Brett save £1 million on WAN (wide area network), server support and server room running costs. Additional cost savings will be achieved from reductions in desktop replacements, upgrades and maintenance to achieve overall cost savings of more than £2.6 million over the next 5 years.

Designed and implemented by Esteem, the Brett system will utilise Citrix XenApp technology to deploy applications centrally for improved access, productivity and performance. The use of VMware technology to virtualise Brett's server environment will reduce the number of physical servers from 74 to approximately 30, significantly cutting its carbon emissions and associated power consumption costs.

IT services specialist, Esteem, will upgrade Brett's operating system (to Microsoft Windows 2008), Active Directory and email archiving as part of the core solution. High availability, resilience and disaster recovery are all key requirements of this project and the Brett Group will also introduce a secondary data centre for improved failover of the primary IT infrastructure. Esteem will consolidate Brett's storage requirements using NetApp technology into an effective storage area network (SAN) that can accommodate mission critical applications.

"Esteem's targeted approach and comprehensive solution meets our complex requirements whilst delivering a personal service," explains Moyes. "Esteem's technical expertise, business understanding and nationwide, 24x7 managed services compete with that of much larger suppliers. We look forward to reaping the return on investment such expertise can provide."