Logicalis

Logicalis managed service helps Swinton Insurance stay a very healthy 50 something!

The Client

When cars first became affordable for most back in the 1950s, finding insurance cover wasn't all that easy - that is until Swinton Insurance opened its first branch in Salford and created a way of buying cover we nowadays take for granted.

Founded in 1957 and now part of the French company, Mutuelles du Mans Assurances, Swinton Group has grown over the years to become the UK 's largest high street insurance intermediary. With around 580 branches and over 3700 employees, it has certainly never shied away from taking on the giants of the insurance industry. On the contrary, by continually demonstrating genuine concern for customers, Swinton has its sights firmly set on becoming the UK 's leading personal insurance retailer.

The Challenge

Never has a smooth running network infrastructure been more important than in the current economic downturn, as customers step up their search for the best possible deal, according to Swinton's Network Manager, Owen Rawlinson.

“At Swinton, every customer counts, regardless of the state of the economy,” he says. “At a time like this, though, the last thing we want is to lose business to competitors because customers are unable to get an instant quote on a policy when they visit one of our branches,” he says.

“For this reason, our branches rely heavily on our core network. Our website, which receives tens of thousands of enquiries each day, is equally reliant on the payment system running on the network, which means it too is unable to tolerate any downtime.”

In point of fact, Rawlinson says Swinton has several key sites where its local area network (LAN) service is so crucial to the business that any type of failure or degradation of the service could have dire consequences. In the absence of all the necessary tools and expertise, however, he says his small in-house network support team was finding it increasingly difficult to manage the company's core network.

“We therefore felt we needed an external partner to help us manage the 100 or so devices and switches within our LAN infrastructure that link our five key sites in and around Manchester. We also required a variety of additional services involving maintenance, network monitoring and reporting.”

The Solution

When evaluating potential solution providers, a key factor in Swinton's choice was the supplier's ability to demonstrate an excellent track record and value for money in delivering managed services to clients. To this end, it conducted a rigorous due diligence exercise to assess the capabilities of its preferred supplier and to confirm that it would present minimal risk to its business.

In January 2008 Swinton appointed Logicalis to work alongside its internal network support team, whose primary focus is first line support and problem analysis. During the pre-contract negotiations, Logicalis worked closely with the Swinton team to understand their key requirements and to propose a low risk bespoke solution.

“Having first assessed Swinton's overall infrastructure, we quickly discovered that, to provide them with a truly effective managed service, a LAN refresh was required,” says Dave Wiblin, Managed Services Consultant at Logicalis. “Much of their LAN equipment was getting beyond its supportable life, so taking a partnership approach, we began by proposing a redesign of their network infrastructure.

“Unlike most of our competitors who simply offer their customers an out-of-the-box managed service on a ‘take it or leave it' basis, we prefer to provide our clients with a more bespoke service,” says Wiblin. “For instance, when Swinton indicated they wanted to share access to the CA Spectrum and CiscoWorks management platforms for their network so they could carry out some fault management of their own, we were more than happy to oblige by setting this up.

Wiblin says that from the start, Logicalis' relationship with Swinton has been all about partnership and flexibility. “For instance, because Swinton is a financial services institution, we undertook a fair amount of work initially to ensure the processes and security management methods were fully in line with their Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance requirements. In ways like this, we tried to demonstrate early on that we were prepared to go the extra mile to make the project successful.”

Once the LAN was refreshed, Logicalis began working with Swinton's network support team to provide a cost-effective managed service for its Manchester sites. This covers everything from the supply and maintenance of LAN equipment and software, through management information and reporting services, to helping them with new network installations, changes, expansions and upgrades.

The Outcome

“We've already undergone a successful period of design work with the Logicalis team to refresh the equipment at our head office site, as well as a number of new sites we're expanding into” says Rawlinson. “They are now providing us with day-to-day monitoring and trouble-shooting on our core network and at new sites. Their proactive management of our LANs includes making recommendations for changes, redesign and upgrades to ensure a consistently effective network service to the business.

“Thanks to their breadth and depth of capability in technologies from Cisco, CA and other vendors, they are able to provide us with expertise we lack internally – and at a reasonable cost - rather than us having to recruit and train new staff.

“If we require a change or some additional analysis, we can either use the tools they've given us access to - or request them to do it for us. This gives us a much greater level of detail than we had before. The network technologies and designs that have been implemented have certainly eliminated any instances of network failure and provided us with resilience against component failures.”

The Future

After 12 months of working with Logicalis, Rawlinson says he is delighted with their contribution and Swinton now have much greater level of visibility across their core network.

“Having delivered us a LAN refresh on time and to budget, we're totally confident in their understanding of our requirements and their ability to be totally flexible and demonstrate a true partnership approach when delivering the service. This is underlined by the fact that the primary technical specialist Logicalis has assigned to our network is now so integrated with the rest of my team he's considered to be one of them.

“What's more, as a result of the excellent working relationship we've developed with Logicalis over the past 12 months, we've now chosen them to support us with a large virtualisation and storage consolidation project that involves considerable infrastructure transformation. For this, we required a partner we could trust and one in whom we would have confidence to help us select and support the appropriate technologies. I believe they fit the bill perfectly. We also expect to involve them in planned enhancements to further improve resilience, speed recovery and optimise resources,” he concludes.