Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

BCS Announces Extended Software Asset Management Contract with Shop Direct

Business Continuity Services (BCS), a trusted global provider of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions and services, today announced, after working with them extensively throughout 2011, an extended contract with Shop Direct, one of its many key customers.

Shop Direct Group is the UK’s leading online and home shopping retailer with nine brands including Littlewoods, Very and isme. Shop Direct are using Software Organiser; a market leading software licence management tool supplied and supported by BCS that provides everything an organisation needs to effectively identify and control costly software assets.

Following a period of intensive SAM focused activity; Shop Direct has now engaged BCS to provide an ongoing SAM Managed Service Delivery Programme plus ad-hoc consultancy services.

Through their SAM Managed Delivery Programme, BCS is providing Shop Direct with a “per device, fixed fee, fully managed compliance service (FMS)”. BCS will manage Shop Direct’s SAM compliance programme, helping the organisation to maintain compliance, prepare for audits, plan software upgrade paths and control software maintenance costs. This enables the Shop Direct IT team to focus on their core responsibilities in the knowledge that these essential tasks are in experienced professional hands.

A Shop Direct spokesman stated; “BCS continues to work with us to ensure our internal software asset management solutions meet the high standards expected of a successful commercially driven company such as ours.”

Shop Direct has an annual turnover of £1.7 billion and over five million customers. Its contact centres and warehouses handle over 19 million calls and over 53 million items per year. To put this into context, this exciting online retailer sells a pair of jeans and a dress every 12 seconds. In recent years, Shop Direct has grown its online ecommerce trading with the IT department evolving in tune with these developments, thus necessitating the need to identify and better manage their increasingly expensive software assets.

With over 8,000 devices spread across multiple sites around the UK, Shop Direct was looking for a supplier with extensive SAM experience and impartial licensing knowledge. Having provided independent and accurate information for over 17 years on optimizing software licensing, normalising audit data and helping customers to achieve software licence compliance; BCS was an obvious choice.

Today, through its SAM Managed Delivery Programme and consultancy services, BCS is helping Shop Direct execute its Software Asset Management plan in order to achieve a controlled Effective Licence Position (ELP) enabling reconciliation and management of software installs plus identification and reduction of any associated risks. As part of the service, BCS also helps Shop Direct to effectively appreciate and manage multiple vendor software agreements and contracts in order to achieve a mature software licence compliance position.

Andy Fisher, New Business Development Director for BCS comments: “To date, we have enjoyed an excellent working relationship with Shop Direct. Over the past couple of years, we have worked together to enhance their ability to recycle and re-harvest their licence estate and as a result, Shop Direct now has its software licences and SAM practices under control. We are delighted that we have been invited to continue working with Shop Direct as I think this clearly demonstrates the value that we are providing through our SAM Managed Service Delivery Programme which now covers approximately 140,000 devices world wide for clients of all types.”

FACTFILE:
BCS is a trusted global provider of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions and services with over 17 years’ of relevant experience. BCS also operate as the Exclusive Global Distributor for Software Organiser, a market leading software licence management tool that provides everything a customer needs to effectively control costly software assets. BCS solutions have helped customers save millions of pounds in unnecessary software licence fees and hardware maintenance costs.For further information please visit: http:/bcsltd.com/

Saturday, 17 December 2011

iomart Hosting keeps online retailer sweet after X Factor judge Gary Barlow’s tweet points 1 million fans to website

A top UK managed hosting and cloud computing company iomart Hosting [http://www.iomarthosting.com] helped Britain’s biggest online sweet shop A Quarter Of [http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/]cope with unprecedented demand after X Factor judge Gary Barlow tweeted to fans before last weekend’s final.

Two days before Little Mix were crowned 2012 X Factor winners, Gary Barlow, whose Twitter name is @GBarlowOfficial, tweeted to his 972,000 followers to ‘Check this bag of goodies out www.AQuarterOf.co.uk.’ Within seconds over 15,000 people had logged on to the retro sweet retailer’s website.

iomart Hosting managing director Sarah Haran, said: “The bandwidth graph for A Quarter Of clearly shows the huge spike in visitors to the website but there were no issues other than the retailer’s staff having to go into overdrive to meet the unexpected demand for Christmas orders!”

Michael Parker, managing director of A Quarter Of, said: “We had no idea what was going on. There was a sudden massive flood of orders, which, on top of Christmas, put a real strain on operations. But we’ve got a great technology team and a great hosting company, so we just ploughed on until we got everything done.”

A Quarter Of moved to iomart Hosting in 2007 after experiencing serious problems with a previous provider.

Michael Parker explained: “iomart Hosting have been really, really good since we moved to them. I noticed a surge in traffic to the website last week when the tweet went out but nothing more dramatic than that. In the past when we've had sudden surges of traffic, and we've had a fair few, we frequently had the server go down and were completely unable to cope. In one instance in the run up to Christmas in 2003, the site went down for 8 hours and I ended up with an email inbox with 5,000 emails in it. We had to put the phone on automatic answering because we just couldn't cope! This time with iomart Hosting everything went smoothly.”

So what sweets did the Take That star buy?

Michael Parker says: “We’re not in a position to say what it was that Gary Barlow ordered from us. But we are incredibly proud to count him as a fan. Lots of people in the office have been fans of his for years and some of them are still a little bit giddy about the whole thing.

It’s great to know that even superstars love retro sweets. There’s something about enjoying them which transports you back a much simpler time.”

A Quarter Of recently featured on Nigella Lawson’s website as her ‘sweetshop of choice’, and also counts MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace as a fan.

iomart Hosting provides managed hosting and cloud services for a number of well-known online retailers. It is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc which is ranked as one of the top 25 cloud services providers in the world by Talkin’ Cloud 50 and was named Scottish Digital IT Company of the Year 2011.