Ordnance Survey reduces IT maintenance costs by up to 20 per cent with consolidated approach

Customer challenge

Ordnance Survey's digital geospatial data accounts for 90 per cent of its business and underpins around £100 billion worth of economic activity. This data and the supporting systems must therefore be highly available. The organisation's previous approach to systems maintenance involved multiple contracts with various vendors, and was both costly and complex to manage. Ordnance Survey needed a solution that minimised risk while reducing costs.

Computacenter solution

Ordnance Survey has consolidated its hardware maintenance agreements with Computacenter. The IT services and solutions company provides maintenance services for nearly 400 HP, Sun and Cisco servers and more than 200 networking devices. As well as providing its own engineers, Computacenter co-ordinates vendor resources, ensuring that all maintenance services are delivered within specified timelines.

Results

By partnering with Computacenter, Ordnance Survey has been able to simplify IT support while safeguarding the availability of its critical systems and mapping data. The consolidated agreement has also enabled the organisation to make annual cost savings of up to 20 per cent.

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Customer profile

National mapping agency
Ordnance Survey is Great Britain's national mapping agency. The organisation is responsible for providing up-to-date accurate geographical data for business, leisure, administrative and educational use.

Although part of the UK government, Ordnance Survey is a self-funded organisation with annual revenues of £100 million. Ordnance Survey employs more than 1,000 people, including 300 surveyors who are constantly measuring and recording the changing British landscape.

The organisation, which dates back to the 18th century, also uses a network of 24 orbiting satellites and 100 base stations to source its mapping data.

Business challenge

Balancing data availability and cost
Although best known for its paper maps, digital data accounts for 90 per cent of Ordnance Survey's business. This data and the organisation's computer mapping services are helping to transform how businesses and public sector organisations operate and engage with their clients.

In total, it is estimated that millions of pounds' worth of economic activity is dependent on Ordnance Survey's geospatial information, which is used for council planning, location-based mobile phone services, in-car navigation systems and transport logistics systems.

To ensure that the data used for these and other services remains accurate, Ordnance Survey must process around 5,000 updates to its databases every day. Duncan Munro, Information Systems Supplier Manager at Ordnance Survey, comments, "Our geospatial databases are at the heart of our operations. If IT issues impact the availability of this data we cannot process mapping updates from our team of surveyors."

The IT platform that supports the organisation's databases must therefore be extremely resilient. While ensuring that the IT infrastructure remains highly available, Ordnance Survey must minimise the costs associated with supporting it. Previously, the organisation had held a number of different agreements with various vendors, but this approach had a high management overhead.

Computacenter solution

Consolidated hardware maintenance
Ordnance Survey works with Computacenter to procure and support its business-critical technology. "We purchase the majority of our hardware through Computacenter, and have now consolidated our maintenance contracts through the company as well," comments Duncan. "Procuring maintenance for each product at point of sale means that we have total transparency of current and forecasted spend."

Computacenter provides maintenance services for a range of equipment within the development/testing and production environments at Ordnance Survey.

This includes:

• IBM midrange storage systems that host 500 terabytes of data
  
• More than 300 Cisco infrastructure components, such as servers, switches and wireless access points to support the local area network
• 120 Sun Microsystems servers
  
• 250 HP servers.

While support for the HP servers is provided directly by Computacenter engineers, IBM, Cisco and Sun support is delivered by the vendors with Computacenter acting as a central co-ordination point.

Service levels are based on the criticality of each device, ranging from a four-hour onsite response for Ordnance Survey's crucial systems to next-day repair and parts replacement for the development/test infrastructure. "By matching service levels with business need, we can balance risk with cost," comments Duncan.

Results

Easier IT management and reduced costs
By consolidating hardware maintenance with Computacenter, Ordnance Survey can ensure a consistent and reliable approach. As Duncan confirms, "With Computacenter's centralised maintenance services we have a single point of contact, which reduces the administrative burden."

This consolidated approach enables Ordnance Survey to:

Manage risk: Ordnance Survey has access to the skills, resources and experience it needs to minimise IT downtime and maximise data availability.

Remove complexity: With just one supplier to manage, Ordnance Survey has been able to free up internal staff to focus on high-level activities.

Reduce costs by up to 20 per cent a year: The partnership with Computacenter enables Ordnance Survey to take advantage of economies of scale and the company's vendor relationships.

"Computacenter helps us to ensure we have the most appropriate level of support at the lowest price point," comments Duncan. "By minimising the cost of IT maintenance, we can deliver more cost-effective mapping services to our customers."