Hastings Insurance Services
Following a management buy-out, Hastings Insurance Services quickly realised that it would need to upgrade its messaging and storage infrastructure to improve business continuity, and it turned to ISC for help.
Client
Launched in 1997 and employing 725 people, Hastings Insurance Services offers customers private car insurance, home and motorcycle insurance as well as a full range of additional products, such as motor breakdown cover.
Business driver
The company was bought by its management team from Insurance Australia Group, with the aim of becoming one of the UK’s leading insurance providers. When James Fairhurst, IT Director, joined Hastings Insurance Services he soon realised that work needed to be done on the underlying IT infrastructure. “Within two weeks of me joining the company, we had a major e-mail outage which lasted four days. So we immediately started work on a project to put in place a new, stable messaging infrastructure that would take us from Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to 2007 and provide secure and robust backup.” Initially Hastings worked with an existing supplier to specify and plan the migration. However, over two months later and the configuration was still not finalised so in growing frustration, the company sought a second opinion. “Although I’d not used ISC before, I’d worked with ISC’s account manager and he gave me the confidence ISC could deliver, so I asked them to come in and discuss the migration project,” explains James Fairhurst.
Solution
ISC moved quickly and within days, the company had met with Hastings and delivered its proposal. “The other company had been recommending a particular route for the migration, but when we received ISC’s proposal, it clearly showed that it would have failed. At that point we lost confidence in the other supplier and decided to work with ISC.”
“ISC looked at what we wanted to do and came up with a robust solution. Their specialists were also innovative in how they proposed to resource the project, which saved us time and costs, and they clearly wanted to work in partnership with our internal team, which was important to us,” explains James Fairhurst.
The solution ISC proposed was based on HP ProLiant servers and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Arrays. “Part of my strategy was to move to HP equipment. Compared to other vendors, I think its products are slightly ahead in terms of reliability and performance. They are also easier to manage using the tools that are included in the HP Insight Control Management Portfolio,” he says.
With the pressure of getting all users live on the system by the end of the following month, time was becoming crucial. “Hastings Insurance Services was being bought by its management team and there was a deadline on the separation from Insurance Australia Group. Part of the project was giving off-site staff access to the new Hastings e-mail system and we had to complete that imminently,” explains James Fairhurst.
Hastings placed the order with ISC on 23 December and ISC worked hard with HP to ensure that in, spite of the holidays, the equipment was delivered to site for 6 January, when its consultants were due to start work.
Hastings’ IT team racked the equipment while ISC’s consultants loaded the operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server. The migration of the 550 mailboxes was a team effort, as was the physical configuration of the 400 existing desktops, which was completed over an eight-hour period. The implementation was finalised soon after and 40 off-site staff were added to the system, meaning that the project completed on time.
Benefits
“The way ISC carried out the implementation was really quite impressive. Its consultants were skilled, diligent and really threw themselves into the project. It really was a case of all hands to the pump. In addition, they worked really well with our own staff, the transfer of knowledge to our support team was excellent and the documentation was very good.”
Hastings now has a stable e-mail infrastructure, complete with backup that it can rely on and the company is already working with ISC on other projects. “Now that I’ve worked with ISC’s consultants on this project, I am confident in their ability to help us further. “ISC has since provided us with the infrastructure to support our new HR and Finance systems and we’re currently talking to them about our new MI platform and our off-site DR environment,” concludes James Fairhurst.
