Ella’s Kitchen
Sector
FMCG
No. of Users
75
Location
Henley, UK
Client Since
2012
The challenge
In 2012 Ella’s Kitchen recognised it had an unreliable and dated IT infrastructure that was not fit for purpose to meet the challenges of its rapidly growing business. A major refresh was urgently needed and a managed technology support solution was the only answer.
The solution
OryxAlign secured the technology support partnership at Ella’s in June 2012 and immediately set about acquiring an in-depth understanding of the business, its strategy and its processes. It was evident then that little forward alignment was being planned to ensure Ella’s infrastructure was sufficiently scalable, robust and flexible to meet forecast growth demands on the business.
OryxAlign proposed and subsequently implemented a substantive, modern, well structured, managed technology support framework which successfully addressed a number of challenges. The framework comprised a 24×7 service desk providing unlimited infrastructure and user support, an industry leading remote monitoring and management platform which delivered an array of service automation and reporting features, and an onsite engineering facility of 3 days per week to ensure the team at Ella’s had the professional consulting support needed to make the transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ seamlessly, without disrupting existing operations. Improved operational efficiency and effectiveness were key requirements.
OryxAlign also proposed and successfully implemented an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model hosted in the OryxAlign datacentres. The new IaaS comprised of an array of dedicated, virtual servers running on a highly available enterprise platform, with all corporate data residing on high performance SAN storage.
What made this special was OryxAlign’s multi-tiered, consultative approach which went well beyond meeting the standard requirements expected in this particular scenario, in that it provided Ella’s with a modern and scalable IT framework to support their ongoing business operations and growth plans.
The new infrastructure was commissioned in OADC-1 (OryxAlign’s primary datacentre) in parallel to the existing infrastructure, without affecting operations. This allowed for performance testing and provided a window for user acceptance testing (UAT) and training, a key customer requirement. It was vital to the success of the project that the critical business applications (SAP, Cognos, Exchange) were tested and operational from day one.
Business benefits & outcomes
The decision to move from traditional, on-premise computing to the Cloud was one of the most critical operational decisions in Ella’s Kitchens history. An immense amount of hard work and planning was invested in this migration to ensure the seamless delivery of the new infrastructure model. It was undeniably successful from day one. It has stood the test of time since then and has served to instil significant confidence in the Ella’s Board that they have the right IT environment to grow successfully.
The solution delivered immediate, and some unexpected, quick-wins. It allowed Ella’s to instantly scale their infrastructure and deploy much needed application servers across the business. It helped enable the mobilisation of a global, remote workforce. It supported significant increases in productivity across the organisation and provided an employee collaboration platform to improve business efficiency, effectiveness and morale.
An additional and notable gain was peace of mind among the Ella’s Executive, knowing that the new infrastructure provided a highly-available, operational platform with redundancy spread across multiple datacentres, and an effective IT disaster recovery solution incorporating quarterly failover testing. This provided the Ella’s Executive with comfort and reassurance that their intellectual property and corporate data was safe, secure and in Tier III ISO27001 datacentre facilities.
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