Chase De Vere Mortgage Management has outsourced its
hardware, office application and e-mail system for a third of the
price offered by top IT service companies by using a software as a
service model.
The mortgage adviser, which employs about 100 people, has
outsourced the management of its IT to Netstore in a five-year
contract. The deal includes its office, finance and business
applications, and infrastructure used by its UK-based staff.
Netstore will charge for the service on a per user per month
basis.
The most important part of Netstore's offering was the ability
to host applications on a shared infrastructure and therefore
enable Chase De Vere to benefit from economies of scale, according
to Michael Schaefer, operations and IT director at the mortgage
adviser.
"The big names [in outsourcing] were superb, but their pricing
model was based on a dedicated solution," he said. "In every case,
the price was three times what I am paying."
Under the deal, Netstore will manage Chase De Vere's IT
infrastructure, including servers, storage, networks, desktops and
all Microsoft Exchange, Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server and mortgage
brokering applications. Using its central Citrix hosting platform,
Netstore will be responsible for all the systems and deliver a
disaster recovery service from its datacentres in Reading and
Gateshead.
Schaefer said part of the business case for the deal was to
allow the business to make better use of his skills.
"Why do I have a server sitting here that I have to patch up,
while every company in the building is doing the same thing because
they all run Microsoft Office?" he said.
"We were looking at the finance case for this, and the company
is getting back somebody who knows about the business for free.
When I was getting my hands dirty, it was not the best use of my
time."
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