British Telecom is installing an online back-up system for the
3,000 members of its retail division's Major Business sales force
following the discovery that 90% of the team were not backing up
their data adequately.
Application service provider Netstore is working together with
hardware vendor Dell to provide an online back-up system. The
implementation is set to save the telecommunications giant more
than £1m in hardware and operating costs.
The companies are working with BT's information systems group, and
are using Netstore's online back-up software together with Dell's
PowerEdge server technology and PowerVault storage systems for data
archiving.
The idea behind the system's implementation is to improve the
efficiency of the existing internal back-up process, while
eliminating the need for additional hardware.
The project will also reduce the need for support from BT's
internal IT engineers, resulting in further cost savings.
"The back-up of business-critical data is of paramount importance
to us," said Richard Collier, head of IT innovation and
infrastructure at BT Retail Major Business. "By our calculations,
with the previous manual system, only 10% of the sales force was
adequately backing up data on a regular basis.
"The Netstore/Dell remote back-up solution does the backing up for
us with minimal effort and responsibility on the sales executives
and provides us with a way to manage and monitor the back-up
process across the whole Major Business sales force."
Collier anticipates the system to be applied to other areas of BT's
business, as well as further afield.
"Following the successful implementation within Major Business,
there is good potential for further internal rollout within BT, as
well as the possibility of us being able to offer the solution to
our customers."
Gary Smith, chief executive officer of Netstore, is convinced that
the success of the system will lead to further orders.
"We see this as an exciting new development. The impact of this
solution makes it a compelling business proposition for other
companies."