IT Estate Reduces Operating Costs And Improves Service Levels

Bournemouth Borough Council – now known as the BCP Council (Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole Council) – is unitary local authority that aims to provide greater opportunities for business, growth and prosperity across the Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole area in England.  

As the initial five-year PFI contract for IT services for Bournemouth Library drew to a close, Bournemouth Borough Council was required to put the contract back out to tender. Allied was the existing supplier and, after participating in a highly competitive bid process, won the new contract to deliver a complete technology refresh for the library. Key factors included government environmental and ‘Gershon’ procurement efficiency initiatives. In a separate contract that ran concurrently, Allied was also appointed to provide fully managed IT services to the library network for five years. 

Addressing the client requirements, Allied Worldwide was tasked to: 

• Perform a technology refresh for Bournemouth’s library, serving approximately 165,000 residents, 

• Improve library technology infrastructure to deliver enhanced service levels for end users, 

• Provided reliability and resilience with a fail-safe backup and recovery solution, and scope for expansion, 

• Reduce overall costs, especially in respect of data center power consumption. 

Our tailored service solutions to Bournemouth Borough Council included: 

• VMware cloud server infrastructure in off-site datacentre – replacing the existing Allied server-based solution, 

• Comprehensive datacentre backup capabilities, enabling disk-level and agent-level backups, 

• Additional servers on-premises at the council offices to provide further capacity for expansion, 

• Storage Area Networking (SAN) to connect council office and data center IT resources, 

• Upgrades to in-library IT assets, including desktop PCs, network and security infrastructure, 

• Implementation of a new VoIP communications system at the library. 

Our successful solution implementation resulted in: 

• Major financial and environmental gains from reduced power demands of 70% fewer servers, 

• Cost savings achieved through Allied managing third party supplier relationships, 

• More reliable, highly available IT infrastructure, delivering improved service to the library’s end users (>97% performance against SLA on average), 

• Strong compliance with environmental and ‘Gershon’ efficiency initiatives. 

Through the project, Allied and Bournemouth Borough Council achieved: 

• Reliability and Resilience – With a fail-safe backup and recovery solution, and scope for expansion. 

• Continuous Improvements – Allied continuously amends and upgrades the managed service using ITIL v3-based best practices. 

• Business as Usual – Allied minimised downtime during implementation as all library facilities remained fully open.